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Apologies for cross-posting FRICTION SPACES Lecture #3 The urbanisation of transition and the geo-politics of real estate Oleg Golubchikov "urban real estate has become a major vehicle for the production of uneven development under the post-socialist varieties of neoliberalism" Monday 2 Decembre 2013 20h STUK - auditorium Naamsestraat 96 - Leuven Abstract Cities play a crucial role in the establishment of capitalism over the ex-communist societies. While cities are often portrayed as merely a projection of the larger societal changes, they are actually an important social and material framework for the production and reproduction of the new relationships of (neoliberal) capitalism, including class (trans)formation. Moreover, the "urbanisation of transition" plays a direct role as a new geo-institutional framework for state regulation. Most remarkably, urban real estate has become a major vehicle for the production of uneven development under the post-socialist varieties of neoliberalism, with effects far beyond the local/city scale. In countries such as Russia, the politics of real estate has effectively replaced the previously comprehensive national-scale urban policies. Real estate is thus rendered not simply economic but also geo-political functions, articulating the new modalities of state, space, scale, class and capital accumulation. I will want to specify this argument by grounding it into a number of concrete practices in Russia: (a) reforms of the housing utility complex; (b) the external geographies of corporate architecture; and (c) uneven accumulation through mega-event projects. Through these practices, I will illustrate how real estate has become important for the new state politics of space and scale in capitalist Russia. Bio Oleg Golubchikov is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Human Geography at Cardiff University in the UK. He was educated at Moscow University and the Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm) and gained his Doctorate from the University of Oxford. Before joining Cardiff University, he worked at the Universities of Oxford and Birmingham. His research is concerned with the critique of the urban political economy of post-socialist transition, while he also critically explores relationships between post-carbon transitions and urban geographies. He has published on topics such as urban and regional development, neoliberal urbanism and world city entrepreneurialism, post-suburban politics of place, housing policy, gentrification, as well as energy efficient housing. He has also advised UN branches, including UN-HABITAT and UNECE, and published with them on the international policy practices concerned with sustainable housing, energy efficient housing and climate neutral cities. ---------------------------------------------------- About FRICTION SPACES. Friction Spaces is a lecture series organised by PhD students in Human Geography at KU Leuven, VUB, UAntwerpen and UGent. It centres around the use of space and the consequential confrontations and contestations between different stakeholders that take place in that space. The spatial-temporal aspects of human action can be interpreted in terms of a competition of who uses which spaces when and for which purpose. By frequenting certain spaces at certain times for certain activities, individuals and groups -consciously or not- put claims on the spaces they use. As different kinds of actions often are set in a same space, this leads to tensions and possibly open conflict. Although the nature and scale of the claims may vary according to context and actors, these claims always create something new and thrilling for everybody concerned with the spaces we live in and use every day. In Friction Spaces, different national and international scholars of a broad range of topics are invited. Both urban and rural contexts are dealt with, but the topics always centre on a certain space and the frictions between groups, individuals and functions that use this space and compete for it. https://www.facebook.com/pages/Friction-Spaces/246553258805354?fref=ts ---------------------------------------------------