Embodying Land Financialization & Infrastructures
The UPE Reading Group’s Double Session ‘Embodying Land Financialization & Infrastructures’ was organised on 14 February 2025 at the University of Amsterdam. It featured several guest speakers, highlighting two significant works in the field.
Session 1: Class Meets Land
Maria Kaika and Luca Ruggiero presented their recent book “Class Meets Land: The Embodied History of Land Financialization” (2024), a text that examines social class and land financialization in Italy.
Session 2: The body as infrastructure
Luis Andueza, Archie Davies, Alex Loftus, and Hannah Schling discussed their article “The Body as Infrastructure” (2020), exploring new theoretical frameworks in urban political ecology.
These discussions were followed by a joint dialogue with all authors moderated by Tait Mandler.
The double session helped us to bridge foundational Marxist concepts such as dialectics, metabolism, labour, circulation and class struggle to new perspectives in UPE. We were particularly interested in the critique of global and racial capitalism, and the role bodies take to resists its forces. The double session enabled us to connect some dots such as:
How to ground questions of class struggle by understanding how land is mobilized by both capital and labour?
How can the Marxist concept of metabolism be extended to thinking through the body and everyday life?
This double session was made possible by the generous grant that the UPE Reading Group received from GPIO’s Urban Planning group. We thank Tuna Taşan-Kok for offering this grant to our group.
