Class Meets Land: The Embodied History of Land Financialization
Maria Kaika and Luca Ruggiero’s recently published book Class Meets Land was the focus of UPE Reading Group’s Embodying Land Financialization and Infrastructures double feature session on 14 February 2025 at UvA’s Roeterseiland Campus. The abstract follows with a link to Maria and Luca’s presentation.
Abstract
Class Meets Land reveals something seemingly counterintuitive: that nineteenth-century class struggles over land are deeply implicated in the transition to twenty-first-century financial capitalism. Challenging our understanding of land financialization as a recent phenomenon propelled by high finance, Maria Kaika and Luca Ruggiero foreground 150 years of class struggle over land as a catalyst for assembling the global financial constellation.
Narrating the close-knit histories of industrial land, industrial elites, and the working class, the authors offer a novel understanding of land financialization as a “lived” process: the outcome of a relentless, socially embodied historical unfolding, in which shifts in land’s material, economic, and symbolic roles impact both local everyday lives and global capital flows.
Maria Kaika is a planner, urban geographer, and architect. She is Director of the Centre for Urban Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her books include Turning Up the Heat: Urban Political Ecology for a Climate Emergency, The Political Ecology of Austerity, In the Nature of Cities, and City of Flows.
Luca Ruggiero is Professor of Economic and Political Geography in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Catania, Italy. His books include Tardo industrialismo: Energia, ambiente e nuovi immaginari di sviluppo in Sicilia, La dipendenza energetica dell’Unione Europea: Strategie geopolitiche e scenari innovativi, and Temi di geografia economica.