Defetishizing the asset form

Abstract

In response to Birch and Ward's paper, this commentary makes a call for a more systematic attempt to politicize contemporary logics of property ownership, and the extractive financial schemes based upon them. Building on earlier critiques of commodity fetishism in geography, I argue that a geographical politics of the asset form can help us defetishize and (re-)politicize the DNA of the ‘global return society’. Innovative visual methodologies play a key role in making new asset geographies public and actionable for social change.