The uneven geography of real estate investment by Mainland Chinese state-owned and private enterprises in the U.S.: Local market conditions, migration, and ethnic networks

Since the 2010s, foreign direct investment in real estate (FDIRE) by Mainland Chinese firms has emerged as a major force within global real estate markets, challenging Western investors’ traditional dominance. It is unclear, however, whether Mainland Chinese FDIRE is fueled by the same motivations as those of investors from advanced economies, which to date have represented both the primary investors and main objects of study. One major difference may be that Mainland Chinese investment originates in an institutional environment comprised of strong state intervention and social networks important for fostering business and ethnic ties. To uncover the potentially unique determinants and heterogeneity of Mainland Chinese corporate real estate investors, we build and analyze a state-level panel dataset of Mainland Chinese FDIRE by state-owned enterprises and private enterprises in the U.S. from 2010 to 2017. Our empirical results reveal the importance of Chinese migrants in promoting Mainland Chinese real estate investment, especially by private enterprises. Our findings also demonstrate that at the state level, Mainland Chinese FDIRE exhibits few agglomerative tendencies.

Everyday speculation in the remaking of peri-urban livelihoods and landscapes

Peri-urbanization is transforming the urban-rural interface of metropolitan areas across the global south. Large-scale planned developments and infrastructure projects result in the widespread displacement of residents and the disappearance of agricultural fields, vegetable plots, and small enterprises. Through multi-year fieldwork in eastern peri-urban Jakarta, we shift the optic from the large players driving these transformations—developers, land brokers, and investors—to examine how residents of peri-urban settlements (kampungs) respond to unexpected developments and manage the uncertainties associated with market-induced displacement. We conceptualize their practices as everyday speculation, extending speculation beyond its financial meaning to include social and cultural aspects. Both displacees in relocation kampungs and holdouts in kampungs subject to displacement make the most of emergent spatiotemporal rent gaps to devise ways to improve their livelihoods and accumulate wealth, but they also attempt to realize their social and cultural aspirations of reproducing kampung ways of life characterized by dense social networks and commoning practices such as mutual aid. Speculation reinforces pre-existing economic inequalities among kampung residents but is not obliterating social and cultural values that contest the norms of neoliberal global urbanism. Scaling up from everyday speculation by individual households, we identify three paths of kampung transformation that are concatenating across a shape-shifting speculative kampung landscape that coexists in a complex and synergistic relationship with the planned developments. Understanding residents’ everyday actions is thus important to grasping the full scope of peri-urbanization.

Platformed professionalization: Labor, assets, and earning a livelihood through Airbnb

This paper analyses processes of professionalization on Airbnb in Berlin, exploring who is able to take part most successfully in urban value creation processes facilitated by short-term rental platforms. In doing so, it intervenes in debates on platform urbanism that focus on the role of digital platforms in reconfiguring urban governance and livelihoods. Combining a political economic approach and affordance theory, I conceptualize professionalization as a particular platform logic that benefits Airbnb and hosts who are able to take part, while reinforcing existing inequalities. Drawing on eight months of fieldwork in Berlin, I show how these professionalization practices differentially affect the strategies and practices of hosts, offering benefits to some while worsening the position of others who are unable or unwilling to professionalize. As such, professionalization processes produce inequalities and power asymmetries both on and off the platform, between hosts as well as between the platform owner and platform users. In a context where a growing number of city-dwellers rely on platforms to generate their livelihoods, such power shifts resulting from platform dynamics have a significant impact on who is able to benefit from platformization and thrive in a platform society.

Multiple entrepreneurial ecosystems? Worker cooperative development in Toronto and Montréal

The emergence in practice of worker cooperative ecosystems, which draws on the entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs) concept, has been largely ignored in academic research. Contrasting worker cooperative development efforts in Toronto with Montréal, we affirm there are multiple and multiscalar EEs in each region, including both a dominant capitalist and a worker cooperative EE. Productive enterprises like worker cooperatives, operating with a different logic than investor-owned firms, not only construct their own EE, but the relational connectedness of the worker cooperative EE to other EEs also plays a role in outcomes. Worker cooperatives have been less successful in navigating these dynamics in Toronto than in Montréal. Future research might seek to more fully specify the relational and multiscalar configuration of regions’ multiple EEs.

A shift from home to the market: The marketization of reproductive labor in India

Commercial surrogacy marketizes life's work. In the era of neo-liberalism, women's work, which is often intimately performed within a heterosexual marriage in exchange of support, now remains a principal avenue to earn money. This form of feminization of labor has led to the emergence of markets for women's reproductive capacities. The present study stems from my ethnographic journey into the lives of the women who work as surrogate mothers in India. The narratives presented in the paper emerge from my prolonged fieldwork in Anand, Gujarat. It engages with the experiences, understandings, and the voices of these women, who I term reproductive laborers, in order to examine the notion of putting one's reproductive capacities in this intimate market for money.

Labour, Efficiency, Critique: writing the plantation into the technological present-future

In this commentary, we call upon critical labour scholars, including labour geographers, to feature what sociologist Palmer called the ‘thrust of efficiency’ more centrally in their work. We put forth that the push for efficiency, as made possible by digital technology, needs to be analysed in terms of its historical lineage as well as in terms of its geographical scope. Centreing efficiency in critical labour studies, necessitates three scholarly moves. These are particularly relevant for labour geography, a field that has so far tended to circumvent questions of coloniality/labour, digital Taylorism, and the politics of (re-)writing economic geographies, in by-passing the literatures that deal with them. The plantation, an analytical category and ontic reality that stretches across several yet often unconnected bodies of literature – literary studies, Black Geographies, Caribbean studies, and the Black Radical Tradition, as well as in Global History – is central to our effort. Eventually, writing the plantation into the technological present-future can be the starting point for a larger and historico-geographically informed critique, in economic geography and beyond, of efficiency, a mode of thinking-cum-praxis based on input–output calculations, objectifying practices, violent value extraction and the removal of undesired ‘social frictions’ for the sake of capital accumulation.

Debtor spaces: Austerity, space, and dispossession in Michigan’s emergency management system

In recent years, debt has become a major focus of geographic research as debt relations have become increasingly central to today’s financialized capitalist economy. This paper bridges two aspects of the debt literature: (1) the emergent literature on debt spatiality, which argues that space plays an active role in the creation and maintenance of debt relations, and (2) the broader literature examining processes of debt-driven dispossession (e.g., foreclosure, eviction, austerity, etc.). Recent literature in geography, led by Harker’s work on debt spaces, has argued that debt should not only be understood as a temporal relation (a promise of future labor) but a spatial relation as well. This literature has examined the active role of space in creating debt relations but has been less attentive to the ways in which debt is a key mechanism of dispossessive economies. Analyzing Michigan’s emergency management laws, a system of forced, localized austerity, I chronicle how the social production of space is central to dispossessive debt projects. I conclude by offering a new concept, debtor spaces, to characterize the socio-spatial formations which enable practices of debt-based dispossession.

Writing economies and economies of writing

Our introduction to the Exchanges section unpacks the two terms, writing economies and economies of writing, as well as previewing the subsequent nine papers included within the section. We contend first, that the economy cannot exist until it is first written about – ‘writing economies’. Here a variety of dates have been suggested as to its first written representation, from roughly 2500 hundred years ago to a mere hundred years. Second, we argue that the pressures on academics to write – ‘economies of writing’ – have never been more acute than now and bound up with the neoliberalization of the university.

“Writing's intimate spatialities: Drawing ourselves to our writing in self-caring practices of love”

This Commentary outlines four conceptual-spatial challenges of academic writing, and suggests an approach to navigating them. Academic writing, as feminist economic geographers argue, is underpinned by difference: emerging from and produced through different positionalities, differing access to stable employment and material, temporal and spatial resources, all set within structures of power and inequity—significant among them the neoliberal university. At the same time, for academics writing demands space in our lives: temporally, locationally, conceptually, and emotionally. Because these spatialities are potentially different for each writer each time we write and because they engage us spatially at a personal level, I term them writing's intimate spatialities, and suggest that care-fully navigating these conceptual-spatial challenges of academic writing stakes out a political position, one that may now be more important than ever: In an academic environment of neoliberalism and increasing precarity, I suggest that writing's prevalent emotional apprehensions may be able to be affirmatively conceptualized as a labor of self-care we come to with love.

From crisis to the everyday: Shouldn't we all be writing economies?

This commentary explores the politics of writing about the economy in a culture, society, and discipline that tends to prioritize masculinist (and white) theories and definitions of economy over embodied experiences of people living their everyday lives. Inspired by Timothy Mitchell's problematization of the economy as an object of analysis, we press further on the seemingly singular unit of “the” economy and who is allowed to define it as such. We are animated by questions of who is considered an expert on the economy and how, or by whom, crises in the economy are recognized. Drawing from our own writing experiences during the pandemic and from social movements we research, we argue for alternate ways of thinking about experiences of and expertise on the economy. In reckoning with how social movements speak to power in a bid to transform economies, we consider the role of economic geography in the economy of writing and knowledge production surrounding “the economy” itself. We make the case for a more public economic geography grounded in the social and economic embeddedness of knowledge production, the material consequences of who gets to define what is economically “important,” and the potential for this expertise to be located anywhere.