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Urban Warfare: Housing under the Empire of Finance
A global study of the financialisation of housing
In Urban Warfare, Rolnik charts how the financialisation of housing has become a global crisis, as home ownership and private property become the sole model of social advancement around the world. These changes were largely promoted by those who benefit the most: construction companies and banks, supported by government-facilitated schemes, such as “the right to buy,” micro-financing and urban land reforms.
Using examples from Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Chile, Israel, Haiti, the UK and especially Brazil, Rolnik shows how our homes and neighbourhoods have effectively become the “last subprime frontiers of capitalism’. This neoliberal colonialism is experienced on the scale of the city but also within our everyday lives. Since the financial crisis, millions have been left homeless, forced onto the streets by urban development politics, and mega-events such as the Rio World Cup in 2014. These narratives are weaved together with theoretical reflections and empirical evidence to explain the crisis in depth. In response, Rolnik restates the political need for activism and resistance around the right to housing and to the city.
In Urban Warfare, Rolnik charts how the financialisation of housing has become a global crisis, as home ownership and private property become the sole model of social advancement around the world. These changes were largely promoted by those who benefit the most: construction companies and banks, supported by government-facilitated schemes, such as “the right to buy,” micro-financing and urban land reforms.
Using examples from Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Chile, Israel, Haiti, the UK and especially Brazil, Rolnik shows how our homes and neighbourhoods have effectively become the “last subprime frontiers of capitalism’. This neoliberal colonialism is experienced on the scale of the city but also within our everyday lives. Since the financial crisis, millions have been left homeless, forced onto the streets by urban development politics, and mega-events such as the Rio World Cup in 2014. These narratives are weaved together with theoretical reflections and empirical evidence to explain the crisis in depth. In response, Rolnik restates the political need for activism and resistance around the right to housing and to the city.
384 pages, Paperback
First published March 26, 2019
48 people are currently reading
1122 people want to read
About the author
Raquel Rolnik
15 books31 followersRaquel Rolnik é arquiteta e urbanista e professora da Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da USP.
Foi relatora especial do Conselho de Direitos Humanos da ONU para o Direito à Moradia Adequada, por dois mandatos (2008-2011, 2011-2014).
Foi diretora de Planejamento da Cidade de São Paulo (1989-1992), coordenadora de Urbanismo do Instituto Pólis (1997-2002) e secretária nacional de Programas Urbanos do Ministério das Cidades (2003-2007), entre outras atividades profissionais e didáticas relacionadas à política urbana e habitacional.
É autora dos livros “A Cidade e a Lei”, “O que é Cidade” e “Folha Explica: São Paulo”. Escreve quinzenalmente, às quartas-feiras, no Yahoo! Colunistas, e às segundas, no caderno Cotidiano da Folha de S. Paulo.
Foi relatora especial do Conselho de Direitos Humanos da ONU para o Direito à Moradia Adequada, por dois mandatos (2008-2011, 2011-2014).
Foi diretora de Planejamento da Cidade de São Paulo (1989-1992), coordenadora de Urbanismo do Instituto Pólis (1997-2002) e secretária nacional de Programas Urbanos do Ministério das Cidades (2003-2007), entre outras atividades profissionais e didáticas relacionadas à política urbana e habitacional.
É autora dos livros “A Cidade e a Lei”, “O que é Cidade” e “Folha Explica: São Paulo”. Escreve quinzenalmente, às quartas-feiras, no Yahoo! Colunistas, e às segundas, no caderno Cotidiano da Folha de S. Paulo.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
September 1, 2019
OMG. What an amazing read. In addition to the fact that the book brings together kind of everything I am really interested in, the author is also a former UN Special Rapporteur on adequate housing. I knew there are socialists in the UN :) Fun fact two: she’s also a massive David Harvey scholar and ‘fan’, I suppose. She mentioned in her acknowledgments how she skyped David Harvey in times of crisis. Lol, I hear you. I sometimes catch myself thinking ‘what would David Harvey make of this?’. Of course, the author is pretty awesome in her own right and managed to get a foreword by David Harvey. Ok, enough of this nerdy fandom already!
‘Urban Warfare’ by Raquel Rolink (VERSO, 2019) brings together ‘state of the art’ Marxist theories on urbanization in contemporary financial capitalism with extensive field work in both the West and Global South. In addition to having been a UN Special Rapporteur on adequate housing, she’s also a professor in urban planning and was the National Secretary for Urban Programmes of the Brazilian Ministry of Cities under the Lula governent and a housing rights activist. No offense to ‘pure academics’ but it’s a different kind of analysis when academics also worked outside the ‘ivory tower’, in government offices, as political activists and even in the UN (and vice versa of course, too).
Essentially, the take over of real estate, especially housing, is a defining feature and structural element of contemporary financial capitalism. It is crucial to understand that we entered a period of financialized capitalism where rent extraction supersedes productive capital surplus value.
The books shows how the financial crisis and related urban politics have left millions homeless, displaced and in financial desperation. The dynamics and stories of displacement and dislocation in New York, Berlin, São Paulo, Nairobi and Jakarta are the same. The financialization of housing has become a global catastrophe with US and UK models of home ownership (investment and speculation in real estate) being exported all over the world. Theres not a single Addis middle class person who’s not desperate to get a piece of mortgage financed real estate. Meanwhile micro-finance and other schemes have become the last ‘subprime frontiers of capitalism’.
In the West, housing and urban policies renounced their role as redustributors of global wealth towards enabling the sell-off of the last bit of housing stock and public land to global finance who then extract ever higher rent from already low wage workers who cannot afford to buy a home or extort insane levels of interest rates to subprime borrowers. The result is the same: increasing inequality and a financialization of every aspect of life.
This of course has also led to the city becoming a major site of anti-capitalist struggle (hence the title) and the book provides a tour of struggles for neighbourhoods and homes and includes many interviews with those displaced from around the globe.
December 8, 2023
I was conflicted on this rating because Rolnik attempted to tackle a colossal thesis in this book, but some parts fell short as the details from her numerous global case studies got muddled and disconnected at times. Although I fell off a bit in Parts II and III (was confused because it was simultaneously too detailed and too broad), it's still a 5 star read because I think overall, it is among the most interesting, innovative books I've ever read in terms of the comprehensive thesis that it puts forward, supported through a truly global, comparative lens. I've never before encountered such a comprehensive, comparative book on urban housing studies.
It's also really cool how this book is a unique product of Rolnik's two backgrounds-- one as a UN Special Rapporteur and another as a socialist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperalist (two backgrounds that you don't frequently see together).
Essentially, Rolnik argues that prior to the 2008 crisis and even more so afterwards, we have been witnessing a global process in which the tools, institutions, and policies of modern finance have commodified, financialized, and colonized urban land and housing through entrenching and expanding the credit market. Both abstract/theoretical and practical/experiential, this book is essential for anyone looking to gain a comparative perspective on the devastating, inequitable global effects of the ubiquitous process of housing financialization.
It's also really cool how this book is a unique product of Rolnik's two backgrounds-- one as a UN Special Rapporteur and another as a socialist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperalist (two backgrounds that you don't frequently see together).
Essentially, Rolnik argues that prior to the 2008 crisis and even more so afterwards, we have been witnessing a global process in which the tools, institutions, and policies of modern finance have commodified, financialized, and colonized urban land and housing through entrenching and expanding the credit market. Both abstract/theoretical and practical/experiential, this book is essential for anyone looking to gain a comparative perspective on the devastating, inequitable global effects of the ubiquitous process of housing financialization.
May 22, 2024
URBAN WARFARE by Raquel Rolnik. Due to being unsure about my major and the general direction of my academic career, I decided to read some scholarship on one of the most essential geographical topics, urban planning and housing. The discourse I had been exposed to around these topics generally fell into two camps: the sort of mac urbanist narrative, which was about combating disparate auto-based sprawl with tighter, more integrated, and more pedestrian friendly design, and the Marxist analysis, which was more concerned with capital’s production, transformation, and subjugation of urban space. I always unconsciously assumed that planners gravitated towards the first camp, with the second being more of a heterodox and impractical school of thought. However, Rolnik is a staunch member of the Marxist school of urban thought and a former planner under the Lula administration. Urban Warfare uses Rolnik’s depth of knowledge on the day-to-day workings of the city to explain the great social crisis of housing: neoliberalism’s transformation of housing from something that could be seen as a public right into another avenue for the creation of profits through financialization. Along the way, homeowners, slum dwellers, and renters real biological existence becomes tied up with the accumulation of capital, leading to a massive swell of debt, homelessness, and forced relocation. Maybe the most fascinating passage is where Rolnik discusses the failure of the PT government, one which she was a part of, to truly implement a right for the city. This book does not offer an easy policy prescription as a way out of the social crisis of housing, it can only point to the new social movements who are trying in any way possible to resist it. There is also some interesting stuff about occupation.
also follow me on instagram @ecschuls_books
also follow me on instagram @ecschuls_books
October 25, 2025
First of all, I'd love to watch an Adam Mckay-style movie about housing reforms in Brazil.
Secondly, "Urban Warfare" feels like two books stitched together: one — a wide, but slightly superficial and dry-ish overview of how financialization ruined housing globally, and another — on Brazil specifically, but with a lot of details, names and events crammed into few chapters. And on one hand I am grateful for this, because the global aspect got our reading group to start the book and then we got the Brazilian story deep dive, which we probably would never pick up on it's own, so it's a "good bait-and-switch" of sorts. But it also left me feeling like both books could have been better have they been developed and published separately and with a slightly deeper anthropological angle.
Secondly, "Urban Warfare" feels like two books stitched together: one — a wide, but slightly superficial and dry-ish overview of how financialization ruined housing globally, and another — on Brazil specifically, but with a lot of details, names and events crammed into few chapters. And on one hand I am grateful for this, because the global aspect got our reading group to start the book and then we got the Brazilian story deep dive, which we probably would never pick up on it's own, so it's a "good bait-and-switch" of sorts. But it also left me feeling like both books could have been better have they been developed and published separately and with a slightly deeper anthropological angle.
August 25, 2020
O livro aborda de maneira geral o direito à moradia com base nas informações levantadas pela autora nos anos de relatora para a ONU em que visitou diversos paises e pode observar e ouvir dos moradores locais os relatos.
Cita as políticas de estado que tem como propósito - ou deveria - promover o direito igualitário à moradia mas tendem na maioria das vezes a apresentar um resultado contrário, beneficiando os investidores e resultando em um aumento do números de pessoas em situação de rua.
A insegurança da posse é algo frequentemente citado, envolvendo fatores como grandes obras que forçam a desapropriação de milhares de residências e/ou o aumento gradativo do valor do aluguel, causando a gentrificação de regiões inteiras.
As informações são embasadas com exemplos reais de cidades do mundo inteiro, entretanto, na última parte do livro esses temas são abordados usando como exemplo mais frequente o Brasil, citando o programa Minha Casa Minha Vida e os megaeventos como a Copa e Olimpíadas.
Cita as políticas de estado que tem como propósito - ou deveria - promover o direito igualitário à moradia mas tendem na maioria das vezes a apresentar um resultado contrário, beneficiando os investidores e resultando em um aumento do números de pessoas em situação de rua.
A insegurança da posse é algo frequentemente citado, envolvendo fatores como grandes obras que forçam a desapropriação de milhares de residências e/ou o aumento gradativo do valor do aluguel, causando a gentrificação de regiões inteiras.
As informações são embasadas com exemplos reais de cidades do mundo inteiro, entretanto, na última parte do livro esses temas são abordados usando como exemplo mais frequente o Brasil, citando o programa Minha Casa Minha Vida e os megaeventos como a Copa e Olimpíadas.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 5, 2021
An incredibly broad account of the underlying abstract processes, governmental encouragement and concrete material consequences of the global financialisation of housing, not to mention the many forms of resistance against it. Great read if you're wondering why you're seeing real estate investment trusts in the news lots lately. So good!
July 19, 2019
A stunningly comprehensive investigation into the global financialization of housing, and those who are still fighting for 'the right to the city' against the crushing weight of real-estate capital.
December 24, 2020
A comprehensive overview of the current state of the global housing crisis, what factors have led to where we are today and what may need to be done to change things.
This is an insightful read, which talks about how the neoliberal view of housing, under the guise of 'home ownership for all', has really been a ruthless method for the expansion of the financial frontier, into areas previously untouched by global capitalism. A variety of case studies into what the world bank calls the 'global south' feature in this book and it is shown that removal of slums in these areas has in fact tied people up into malicious loans from multinational financial organisations. Furthermore, it is explored in depth within this book, how during the 1980's, in countries like the UK, financial credit was made readily available to prospective homeowners. However, all this led to was extreme inflation in house-prices, above the rate of increase of wages and how this led to the chaos of the 2008 financial crisis. Shockingly, 'Urban Warfare' explores how despite the floored concept of financial credit penetrating the housing market and the commodification of what should be considered a basic human right, nothing has changed and without drastic action the current housing crisis will only worsen.
Overall, a very informative read, which takes an evidence based approach when presenting arguments and definitely worth the read from an educational stand-point, with most of the concepts explored being broadly accessible to the average reader.
This is an insightful read, which talks about how the neoliberal view of housing, under the guise of 'home ownership for all', has really been a ruthless method for the expansion of the financial frontier, into areas previously untouched by global capitalism. A variety of case studies into what the world bank calls the 'global south' feature in this book and it is shown that removal of slums in these areas has in fact tied people up into malicious loans from multinational financial organisations. Furthermore, it is explored in depth within this book, how during the 1980's, in countries like the UK, financial credit was made readily available to prospective homeowners. However, all this led to was extreme inflation in house-prices, above the rate of increase of wages and how this led to the chaos of the 2008 financial crisis. Shockingly, 'Urban Warfare' explores how despite the floored concept of financial credit penetrating the housing market and the commodification of what should be considered a basic human right, nothing has changed and without drastic action the current housing crisis will only worsen.
Overall, a very informative read, which takes an evidence based approach when presenting arguments and definitely worth the read from an educational stand-point, with most of the concepts explored being broadly accessible to the average reader.
April 4, 2020
This book had a great premise that it only partly delivers on. The author has an extensive knowledge of housing policies and conditions around the world, and I've never encountered another book that has more detail on such a wide range of countries as this. Unfortunately, that detail is chopped into chapters that are mostly (but not always) organized by topic, resulting in not enough detail on any particular country to get more than a sketch of the local housing picture. The sacrifice is worth it for part I, on the financialization of housing policies, but part II, on insecure tenure, never really coheres into a complete vision of tenure insecurity globally and left me frustrated with an incomplete picture of national situations also. Part III, specific to Brazil, is better, and offers a glimpse at what a better book could have been. Still, despite dry writing and editorial deficiencies, this is required reading for anyone interested in housing policy.
March 11, 2023
Rather understates, or maybe under-explains/under-develops, the need for activism and resistance in relation to the financialization of housing. The book makes plenty of good points, though I did not find the "personalization/location-ization" of the problem to be of any real help. Simply put, this is happening all over the globe, so focusing on certain places didn't strengthen the arguments, just gave examples, of which there are too many already. Everyone loves a "pile on", and this book adds to the pile of books about the massive and expanding housing problem and its links to global finance/capitalism, but it adds nothing of significance or nuance or novelty, an is therefore just another part of the pile. Adds weight, but breaks no new ground at all for this reader.
January 27, 2021
Read it for my literature study class, had a lot (A LOT) of information, with excessive amounts of case studies, by the information wasn't structured in a way which would help people understand, and there was no clear point overall, no conclusion, and not even one overarching theme within the book. She uses her experience as UN special rapporteur on housing as a basis for the book so the information is unique and sometimes insightful but this book should have been more of a memoir and less of an academic text on housing.
June 23, 2024
Very descriptive and very Marxist. But it provides an interesting perspective on how our current housing paradigm was strongly promoted by multilateral organizations and was very well aligned with a neoliberal agenda.
It's similar to 'Un país sin techo' in that it's a recollection of stories that try to adhere to the idea above and not a ton of aggregated data. I would've liked a chapter with viable solutions to this problem and not just a theoretical diagnosis.
It's similar to 'Un país sin techo' in that it's a recollection of stories that try to adhere to the idea above and not a ton of aggregated data. I would've liked a chapter with viable solutions to this problem and not just a theoretical diagnosis.
August 28, 2019
Rolnik has a unique take on the financialization of housing markets as she presents case studies from across the world with a common theme of the ills of this neoliberal phenomena. Interestingly, she also has a critical take on the World Bank's (where she works/worked?) instrumentality as a soft-power in disseminating these ideas.
December 2, 2021
Uma ampla base teórica e experiências de campo. Uma percepção, bem embasada, do impacto da financeirização das moradias. Uma revisão bibliográfica que se embasa em Karl Marx pra contestar um modelo comprovadamente eficaz de expansão da moradia e por fim, uma visão enviesada e partidária e sem nenhuma proposta.
November 14, 2021
Essential reading for comparative urban development/housing studies. Depth of research is amazing but I think Rolnik gets bogged down in putting several case studies around the world in conversation with one another. Still manages to be incredibly concise.
March 4, 2021
Incredible writing on the inequality of housing across the world
March 21, 2021
An excellent overview of the financilization of housing worldwide in part one. Parts two and three kind of lost me with all its details. Nonetheless a great book.
April 13, 2021
Ficou meio repetitivo
July 17, 2023
Good book, boring reading in parts, when she goes to deep into case studies no break in between. But some real bits of gold in there.
December 22, 2024
An astounding and global documentation of how finance has colonised space.
Down with public private partnerships, down with blackstone, down with it all
Down with public private partnerships, down with blackstone, down with it all
May 16, 2025
Kinda rushed through the end, but, all in all, pretty good. Certainly the most comprehensive book about the housing crisis that I've run into. Worth the read.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews