Over the last decade, Spain has become an emblem of the contradictory relationship between capitalism and housing. During the house-price boom of the 2000s, Spain built homes on an unprecedented scale, with output levels that overshadowed those of every major European economy. Nevertheless, when the fortunes of real estate markets turned, a wave of repossessions ensued, and a massive number of households were thrown out into the street as a sizeable portion of the housing stock was lying vacant. In turn, the implosion of Spanish residential capitalism triggered an intense wave of unrest that has come to shape a decade of political turmoil.
This book uses the Spanish case to bring to light, and theorise, the workings of residential capitalism. The author traces the evolution of residential provision from the nineteenth century to the present, situating the transformation of the housing market in a context of ongoing social change and conflict. The book shows how the present needs to be understood by looking at the historical process through which residential provision became subsumed under the logic of capitalist accumulation but also at a long genealogy of struggles around urbanisation and housing, the outcomes of which remain crystallised in Spain’s urban institutions. The author reveals how both residential capitalist development and urban social conflict have constituted each another, casting light on the historical relationship between housing crises, urban unrest, and the evolution of real estate markets. The book develops a historicist framework to understand residential capitalism, an important contribution for an age in which real estate markets have come to determine the rhythms of global capital.
Addressing key issues and debates in the field, including the financialisation of housing, the politics of scale and urban entrepreneurialism, the political economy of the Eurozone, and the history of capitalist development, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of political economy, as well as those engaged in crossover fields such as housing studies, urban geography, or financial geography.
PART I: Housing Under Capitalism 1 Residential Capitalism: A Theoretical Introduction Housing’s Paradoxes Capitalists and Rentiers Hybrid Logics What Is (Residential) Capitalism? A Pre-History of Residential Capitalism Mass Urbanisation Capitalist Residential Production Governing Residential Capitalism Capital, Hegemony, and the State Historicising Residential Strategies Outline of the Book 2 Residential Accumulation in Capitalist Political Economies Residential Accumulation: Between Rent Extraction and Capitalist Production The Hybridity of Housing Provision House Rents in the Capitalist Economy Residential Social-Property Relations: Analysing Capitalist Housing Provision Production Exchange Finance Reproduction PART II: The Liberal Era, 1833–1939 3 Liberal Property and Its Discontents The Formation of the Liberal State Framing the Liberal Revolution Imperial Decline The Liberal City in an Uneven Capitalist Transition A Pre-Capitalist Agriculture Capitalist Production and Mass Urbanisation The Urban Household Pacifying the Urban Masses Spatial Politics of the Liberal Oligarchy Competing State Projects Morbid Symptoms 4 The Contradictions of the Liberal City The Construction of the Liberal City The Creation of Absolute Private Property The Rise of the Market-Dependent Rentier The Capitalist Transition in the Building Trades Repairing the Liberal City Faulty Extensions: The Ensanches Structural Failure: The Underdevelopment of Property Development Foundational Problems: Towards a Social Liberalism The Collapse of the Liberal City The False Promise of Liberal Property The Unravelling PART III: Franco’s Dictatorship, 1939–75 5 The Reconstruction of Urban Modernity Political Anatomy of the Francoist State The Roots of the Counter-Revolution Bureaucratic Factionalism in the National Movement Catch-Up Development and Accelerated Urbanisation Post-War Autarky Geopolitical Realignment and Technocratic Turn The ‘Spanish Economic Miracle’ Catholic Domestication Domination and Unrest in the Francoist City The Limits to Urban Hegemony Death and Resurrection of Urban Unrest 6 The Property-Owning Autocracy Falangist Designs Orchestrate the City Nurture the Developer Euthanise the Landlord Urbanise the Smallholder Developmentalist Consolidation Turf War in the Bureaucracy An Urban State of Exception The Professionalisation of the Capitalist Developer Democratic Horizons The Working Class Goes to Heaven? Democracy Against Residential Capitalism PART IV: The ‘Regime of 1978’, 1975–2023 7 Neoliberalism and the Asset-Price Economy Foundations of the New Liberal State The Constitutional Settlement The State of Autonomies Neoliberal Democracy: A Second Restoration? Neoliberal Restructuring and Asset-Price Speculation The Onset of Neoliberalism Experimenting With Financialisation The Road to the Great Recession Urbanisation in a Rentierised Economy The Rise of Urban Entrepreneurialism The Party-Developer Nexus The Crisis of Neoliberal Hegemony European ‘Modernisation’ and the Petit Rentier Housing Crash and Hegemonic Breakdown The Crisis of the Constitutional Settlement 8 The Democratisation of Rentierism Neoliberalising Housing Provision Supporting the Homebuyer The Liberalisation of Mortgage Finance New Extremes in Capitalist Building Rent and Residence in the Era of Mass Speculation Climbing Up the Property Ladder The Primacy of the Developer ‘House Prices Never Go Down’ Crisis and Recomposition of Residential Capitalism Lineages of the New Urban Activism The Repoliticisation of Residential Capitalism Rise and Fall of the New Municipalism The Revenge of the Landlord Towards a New Moral Economy? Concluding Remarks
Javier Moreno Zacarés is Assistant Professor of International Political Economy in the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University, UK.
Reviews for Residential Capitalism: Rent Extraction and Capitalist Production in Modern Spain (1833–2023)
“This book is an incredibly impressive achievement and contribution, one of the very best yet written on the centrality of housing – how it is mythologized, developed, financed, traded, inhabited, and sometimes lost – to capitalist society, past and present. Moreno Zacarés’s historical canvas is Spain, and what a remarkable history it is! But the insights and lessons are universal.” Brett Christophers, Uppsala University, Sweden
