Urban infrastructure financialization under Brazilian developmental neoliberalism: specificities, limits and contradctions
Funding period: 22 August 2021 – 21 February 2022
Type of funding:
International Fellowship
Beatriz Rufino is a Professor and Researcher at the College of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo (FAU-USP), Brazil, and member of Laboratory of Housing and Human Settlements (Labhab). Leader of the “Space, Production and Urban Policy” Cnpq Research Group (EPPU) and coordinator of the Research Project “Real Estate and Infrastructure under the control of Large Corporations: Financialization and metropolization of space in São Paulo of 21st Century” (Fapesp – Process 2019/18881-0). Her recent research is focused on the financialization of space production seeking to develop a critical understanding of the particularities in the increasing commodification of the metropolises of Brazil and Latin America.
As a USF International Fellow, Dr Rufino will spend six months working with Dr. Thomas Purcell at the Department of European & International Studies in the School of Politics & Economics at King’s College London. Her research aims to understand the specific dynamics of infrastructure privatization and financialization in Brazil and how it is mediated by the subordinate insertion of Latin American countries into the global economy and by the interests of national elites. The project will examine the expansion of new urban infrastructure after the 2008 crisis, discussing the importance of rent capture, the limits of financialization and the contradiction engendered by new strategies of accumulation which did little to reverse historical urban inequalities.