Urban Rent and Financialisation: Convergences, Tensions, and Planning Perspectives in the Light of Publicness

Financialization theory has become an overextended meta-narrative, we argues, treating finance as a coherent, deterministic force when urban change is actually shaped by fragmented local institutions, legal geographies, and contestation. The authors distinguishes financial facade from underlying drivers: zoning, planning decisions, and tenure law are what make land income-generating. Drawing also on Pizzo’s work on Urban Rent (Vivere o morire di rendita, of 2023) the central proposal is to reconnect financialization theory with land rent theory, since their tension (abstraction and liquidity versus the material fixity of land) sharpens analysis of who captures value and how. This leads to a call to repoliticize urban finance, replacing the “global wave” image with a relational, actor-centered account that foregrounds institutions and power asymmetries, ultimately framing rent as a political choice rather than a purely economic mechanism.