Class Meets Land - (Ijurr Studies in Urban and Social Change) by Maria Kaika & Luca Ruggiero

About the Book

"Class Meets Land reveals something seemingly counterintuitive: that nineteenth-century class struggles over land are deeply implicated in twenty-first-century financial capitalism. Narrating the closely knit stories of Milan's working class, industrial elites, and industrial land, Maria Kaika and Luca Ruggiero foreground the tenacious role of class struggle over land in choreographing capitalist transitions. They assert that land assetization and financialization are not recent phenomena but rather historical practices sculpted into the present configuration through long-term rituals and struggles, rooted in the everyday lives and histories of both capital and labor. Exploring land assetization from the outset of capitalism's early history, Kaika and Ruggiero offer a novel understanding of land financialization as a 'lived' process: the outcome of a relentless and socially embodied historical unfolding, within which land performs a multiplicity of ever-changing symbolic and material roles for both capital and labor as it becomes enrolled simultaneously in local class struggle cycles and the circuits of global (financial) capital"--

Book Synopsis

Class Meets Land reveals something seemingly counterintuitive: that nineteenth-century class struggles over land are deeply implicated in the transition to twenty-first-century financial capitalism. Challenging our understanding of land financialization as a recent phenomenon propelled by high finance, Maria Kaika and Luca Ruggiero foreground 150 years of class struggle over land as a catalyst for assembling the global financial constellation. Narrating the close-knit histories of industrial land, industrial elites, and the working class, the authors offer a novel understanding of land financialization as a "lived" process: the outcome of a relentless, socially embodied historical unfolding, in which shifts in land's material, economic, and symbolic roles impact both local everyday lives and global capital flows.

From the Back Cover

"Putting industrial workers front and center in urban political ecology, this book opens up exciting new pathways for understanding land financialization from a historical materialist perspective."--Stefania Barca, author of Workers of the Earth

"In this wonderful book, Maria Kaika and Luca Ruggiero show an unusual capacity to integrate localized historical research with powerful theoretical insights about capitalism, land financialization, and circuits of capital. Before the eureka moment when industrial land was reinvented as an asset, trouble had been brewing for decades. The authors bring to light the symbolic and social dimensions of the destruction/creation process, the long-term lived experience of land financialization, where land use and assetization have been transformative for the locality."--Patrick Le Galès, CNRS Research Professor, Sciences Po Urban School and Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics

"Land is nothing without the labor and laborers who have produced it, live in it, give it meaning, and create its value. As Class Meets Land makes vibrantly clear, what we take to be entirely deracinated--land as a financial asset--is instead the very embodiment of a long history of class struggle. Required reading for anyone who wants to really know what financialization is all about."--Don Mitchell, author of Mean Streets: Homelessness, Public Space, and the Limits of Capital

About the Author

Maria Kaika is a planner, urban geographer, and architect. She is Director of the Centre for Urban Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her books include Turning Up the Heat: Urban Political Ecology for a Climate Emergency, The Political Ecology of Austerity, In the Nature of Cities, and City of Flows.

Luca Ruggiero is Professor of Economic and Political Geography in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Catania, Italy. His books include Tardo industrialismo: Energia, ambiente e nuovi immaginari di sviluppo in Sicilia, La dipendenza energetica dell'Unione Europea: Strategie geopolitiche e scenari innovativi, and Temi di geografia economica.