abstract

Economic geography and housing studies have begun to grapple with how institutional investment operates and impacts particular cities or sites. There has been less attention to the ways in which institutional investment functions across different scales: the theorization of financialization has, to date, left unaddressed the ways in which global or international actors confront multiple scales of corporate strategy, politics, and markets. In this article we utilize a firm-level analysis to engage with the financialization of rental housing in two cities, by following a residential landlord’s entrance into professionalized private residential rental—build to rent (BTR)—markets in London and Amsterdam. Conceptually, we develop a firm-centered approach for analyzing the multiscalar nature of financing BTR to rent housing. This approach combines valuable insights from work on the firm in economic geography and critical perspectives from the wider spatial sciences, to fully grasp a firm’s behavior in relation to the wider political institutional dynamics. We reveal how the firm’s multiscalar corporate strategies interact with highly territorialized systems of regulation and governance in both cities. Despite different market dynamics in London and Amsterdam, in both cities the firm mitigates risk by entering the market via student housing; it acquires local knowledge, and it establishes meaningful connections with private local actors and policy makers. These insights, we contend, contribute to the theorization of financialization by demonstrating the multiscalar nature of the processes embedded within it.

摘要

经济地理和住房研究已经开始解决机构投资如何运作和影响特定城市或地点的问题。对机构投资在不同尺度上发挥作用的方式的关注较少：迄今为止，金融化的理论尚未解决全球或国际参与者面对企业战略、政治和市场的多种尺度的方式。在本文中，我们利用企业层面的分析，通过跟随住宅房东进入专业化的私人住宅租赁——建造到租赁，来参与两个城市的租赁住房金融化(BTR)——伦敦和阿姆斯特丹的市场。从概念上讲，我们开发了一种以公司为中心的方法来分析为 BTR 融资租赁住房的多尺度性质。这种方法结合了公司工作的宝贵见解在更广泛的空间科学的经济地理学和批判性观点中，充分掌握公司与更广泛的政治制度动态相关的行为。我们揭示了公司的多尺度企业战略如何与两个城市的高度地域化的监管和治理系统相互作用。尽管伦敦和阿姆斯特丹的市场动态不同，但在这两个城市，该公司通过学生公寓进入市场来降低风险；它获取当地知识，并与当地私人行为者和决策者建立有意义的联系。我们认为，这些见解通过展示嵌入其中的过程的多尺度性质，为金融化的理论化做出了贡献。