In this guest post, Dr Manuel Dammert-Guardia, (Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru, Peru), Prof Cecilia Wong (University of Manchester, United Kingdom), Dr Hugo Sarmiento (Columbia University, United States), and Dr Jessica Pineda-Zumarán (Centro de Investigación en Teoría Urbana y Territorial URBES-LAB, Peru) discuss their research on speculative real estate dynamics. A series of events will unfold from October 2025 through October 2026, including international seminars and methods schools taking place in Peru and online. Stay tuned for opportunities to engage.
Nowadays, intensifying capitalism and financial capital are having a profound impact on global urbanisation, turning land into a valuable commodity for wealth accumulation. This has exacerbated global capital flows and speculative real estate dynamics associated with money laundering, white-collar crime, and the growth of urban mafias in various contexts. Despite these circumstances arising in diverse spatial contexts, one pervasive effect emerges: the deepening precariousness of housing access and the worsening affordability crisis. In the United States, for instance, investment funds and large real estate corporations are imposing structural barriers to housing access, while state apparatuses are retreating from regulating housing speculation. In the United Kingdom, the national government is aiming to increase the housing supply by devolving powers and introducing radical planning reforms. In Latin America, particularly in Peru, drug cartels and informal land developers have made housing access an extremely inequitable landscape.
However, the increasing presence of these new actors and their practices in many areas of everyday life has led to local and community resistance that needs to be recognised and understood in different national and regional contexts. In Latin America, social movements and housing cooperatives have pioneered alternative models that challenge the speculative logic of markets. By contrast, in the United States and the United Kingdom, resistance strategies have focused on tackling gentrification and eviction by using legal and media tactics to counter the influence of major investors. Meanwhile, critiques of capitalism from feminist intersectional perspectives have emphasised the importance of prioritising the use value of housing and care infrastructures. Indigenous epistemologies also offer transformative ways to resist and subvert the commodification of land. Concepts such as Buen Vivir and alternative notions of property challenge the hegemony of private ownership. In the United States, indigenous peoples have developed territorial models that combine traditional practices with contemporary strategies, reframing property as a collective, intergenerational right. These conceptions offer an ethical framework through which to reconsider property as a shared resource rather than an exchangeable commodity.
Are you aware of the impact of land trafficking on the conservation of the Lomas Costeras? (In Spanish, with self-generated English subtitles)
Dr Manuel Dammert-Guardia, (Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru, Peru), Prof Cecilia Wong (University of Manchester, United Kingdom), Dr Hugo Sarmiento (Columbia University, United States), and Dr Jessica Pineda-Zumarán (Centro de Investigación en Teoría Urbana y Territorial URBES-LAB, Peru) and the respective teams of each institution won the 2025 Seminar Series Award from the Urban Studies Foundation, with the aim of exploring the two sides of the phenomenon described above. On the one hand, the seminar series will debate the nature of speculative real estate dynamics, as well as the emergence of new interests and mechanisms that support questionable actors — including those involved in illegal activities. On the other hand, it will discuss how social movements, organised communities, and individuals develop strategies to resist, reimagine, or survive within structures of hegemonic urbanisation. Through these conversations, the seminar series will identify similarities and differences between three urban development policy and planning structures: the American market-led system, the British planning-led system and the Peruvian regulatory-flexible system. A key outcome of these collective discussions will be the development of a conceptual framework linking local resistance to global structural dynamics of urban development. This framework is expected to challenge the individualistic logic of property ownership by considering alternatives that prioritise collective territorial connections and recognise socio-spatial collective rights.
The seminar series comprises four events that will discuss the issue of land commodification and its impact on housing affordability under capitalist urbanisation around the world. The events will be in different formats and will adopt different perspectives to consider the issue explained above. The first event, a hybrid Research Workshop on Land Commodification and the Housing Crisis, will take place in Lima from 15 to 17 October 2025. This event is intended for university lecturers, doctoral students, postdoctoral researchers and early career researchers from the UK, the US and Latin America. Participants will be selected through an online application process, with the expectation of recruiting 20 in-person participants and up to 10 online participants. The second event will be the Methods School, ‘Doing research under uncertain circumstances’, featuring renowned academics from the UK, US and Latin America as speakers and commentators. It is expected that 25 participants, including master’s and doctoral students, postdoctoral researchers, early career researchers, university lecturers in their first three years of appointment, and consultants from Peru and other Latin American countries, will be recruited through an online application process. The Methods School will consist of two parts. The first part will take place virtually from 9–13 March 2026, followed by the second part in Lima from 12–14 October 2026.
The third event will be the Colloquium, providing an opportunity for academics (i.e. Methods School participants) and non-academics (i.e. policymakers, consultants, activists, and community members) to debate the impact of land commodification on access to housing and daily life. This public event will take place in Lima on 12–13 October 2026. The fourth and final event will be an International Research Conference that will serve to identify the state-of-the-art of land commodification and the housing crisis, as well as new areas of research on the issues discussed. This peer-reviewed event will be open to academics and non-academics and will include paper presentations, thematic roundtables and keynote addresses. It will also be held in Lima from 15 to 17 October 2026.
Throughout these four events, four key questions will be addressed: What logics are at play in speculative real estate dynamics? How do policy, legal and planning structures facilitate and strengthen the actions of those involved in illicit urban development practices? Why are some communities able to resist, choose not to resist or engage differently with these global capitalist urban development trends based on land commodification? And how can these agencies, movements, actors and practices inform ways of countering these dynamics at the local level and across different contexts?