Affordable housing, finance and the state: Towards a global urban comparison

Abstract

The scale of the 21st-century urban housing challenge has prompted state actors in both the Global North and South to adopt increasingly interventionist approaches to ‘affordable’ housing production. This article draws on research in six cities (Shanghai, Nairobi, Paris, Casablanca, Salford and Rome) to discuss the changing relationship between housing, finance and the state through a global comparative perspective. It adopts an urban statecraft lens to examine affordable housing production as a site through which state actors engage with financialisation processes to different extents, leading to the reconfiguration of the state in the process. From this exploratory comparison, the paper identifies three dimensions of statecraft across which state-led affordable housing production can be analysed: state motivations to intervene; the forms of financial and institutional innovation adopted by policymakers; and strategies to redistribute and mitigate the risks associated with financialisation processes. In proposing these dimensions, the central contribution of the article is to establish an analytical framework for further empirical research on the uneven geographies of the global state-housing-finance nexus.