Seminar (TURBA Lab): "Between Rentierization and Financialization in the Global South"

Program

Abstract

Focusing on the political economy of infrastructure in Brazil, this seminar aims to push discussions of rentiership, assetization and urban financialization beyond geographic and disciplinary boundaries. In doing so, the seminar responds to the recent call (O’Brien et al 2019) to expand the geographical scope of urban infrastructure financialization research beyond the purview of the Global North. While strong on the meso-level institutional settings that transforms infrastructure into investment assets and the micro-level techniques that permit the capitalisation of underlying revenue streams, extant approaches have paid insufficient attention to the macro-level dynamics of financialization in the Global South. The latter has been the focus of the ‘subordinated financialization’ literature that, following the Latin American structuralist tradition, has portrayed financialization as a new form of economic dependency. Yet, given the spatial container of the national economy, the trade and production focus, as well as the post-Keynesian interest in international monetary hierarchies, this literature has been generally unconcerned with cities (the sites), and therefore infrastructure (the vehicles), for the accumulation of financial profits and urban rents. To put these streams of research into dialogue we tease out the post 2008 relationship between large capital inflows and revenues from the last commodity super-cycle that underpinned infrastructure investment in Brazil to the benefit of large national contractors. However, in the absence of deep capital markets, monetary instability, and high-risk premiums finance capital and large construction firms relied on public investment, tax cuts and direct subsidies to enable the extraction of value, in the phenomenal form of rent, from urban infrastructure. Drawing on original Marxian scholarship from the Global South, we argue that state policies mediated a process we term the accumulation of capital through the appropriation of infrastructure rents.

Dr Thomas F. Purcell

Lecturer in the Department of European & International Studies at King's College London. Purcell joined the Department of European & International Studies at King’s College in September 2019. He holds a PhD in Politics from The University of Manchester (2010) and completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship (2011-2013), funded by the Spanish Ministry Education, at the Open University of Catalonia’s (UOC) Urban Transformation and Global Change Laboratory (TURBA Lab). Following this (2013-2015), he was Deputy Director of The National Strategy Centre for the Right to Territory (CENEDET) housed at the state postgraduate University (Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales) Quito, Ecuador. He also served 3 years as Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy at Leeds Beckett University.

To take part in this seminar, please contact blancacb@uoc.edu.