Who should own the value of land? Housing, power and the deep politics of land value capture - UK Collaborative Centre For Housing Evidence

Who should own the value of land?

New report by Ed Shepherd and myself on the political economy of land value capture. A major research undertaking (incl 50 interviews) examining the power relations that structure how land values are (unjustly) distributed in England.

@housingevidence.bsky.social

Private equity-owned Hackney nursery closes with 29 days notice Family First said demand had

"From what I understand about private equity is you invest upfront early, you make back your money, you sell & get out – that is the model as I've understood it ...That to me is completely incompatible with healthcare of any form, early years care & so on."

Yep!

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

"It takes a certain kind of mind to look into the world of colostomy bags, incontinence pads and emollient cream and see dollar signs"

Brilliant, visceral piece on private equity + care homes from what is sure to be a banger of a book by @hettieobrien.bsky.social

With conjunctural approaches to urban research fast proliferating, along with the compounding crises they seek to study, now's the time to ask: what's the point of conjunctural analysis? Its purpose, I argue, is to offer a method for identifying points of condensation of crisis and contradiction within the social totality of planetary colonial capitalism, with a view to providing practical pointers on how to begin to exploit those moments for strategic intervention. This makes conjunctural analysis a distinctive, praxis-oriented mode of historical materialism – understood as an open, relational and holistic critical theory encompassing feminist, postcolonial and ecological perspectives, and alert to multiple social relations of domination, of exploitation and appropriation, notably gender, race and ecology as well as class. What conjunctural analysis adds to the two main methods of historical materialism – one apprehending capital's necessary form; the other capitalism's historical formation – is a more strategic and speculative orientation to social change as this emerges through contestation at pressure points in contradictory social formations, to assist in praxis, in the rearticulation of these formations for emancipatory ends. To that end, I attempt to provide conjunctural analysis with an epistemological grounding in dialectical relations between subjectivity and objectivity, totality and particularity, thought and history, past and future – a means to understand where, how and why to look for the conjuncture. The article concludes with suggestions on what such a vision for conjunctural analysis might mean for urban research through considering urban applications of conjunctural thinking.

If this is a conjuncture marked by escalating crises, provoking growing interest in conjunctural thinking across the critical social sciences and humanities, now's the time to ask...

What's the point of conjunctural analysis?

New article out in Dialogues in Urban Research:
doi.org/10.1177/2754...

"Never before has nothing been something worth taking more seriously."

Receive 20% off my new book with the code SAMMAN20:

www.sup.org/books/politi...

mngbookshop.co.uk/978150364586...

Wrote about the Iran crisis, electricity costs, and why clean power is the right strategy - but not enough.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Illiberalism, war, violence and authoritarianism: the current conjuncture – an interview with Professor Anthony Bogues LSE Human Rights Professor Anthony Bogues examines authoritarian resurgence, the unravelling of the postwar order, and the entanglements of liberalism and illiberalism.

What’s driving today’s authoritarian turn? How is the postwar order shifting? And where do liberalism and illiberalism collide?

Professor Anthony Bogues spoke to @neilwarner.bsky.social and @willkend.bsky.social about his recent LSE lecture.

Billionaire halts mass eviction after London Centric investigation Exclusive: Asif Aziz's Criterion Capital hoped to replace hundreds of tenants with more lucrative temporary accommodation. That plan has been shelved – for now.

Really great work from @londoncentric.media. It's a crime that temporary accommodation, funded by council tax payers, is more lucrative than long term rentals www.londoncentric.media/p/asif-aziz-...

1. La vivienda en alquiler se ha convertido en un gran negocio. Los rentistas controlan la economía y la política, pero destrozan la sociedad.

Hay alternativas. La generación inquilina puede acabar con esta desigualdad y cambiar el modelo para siempre.

A partir del 9 de marzo🙌🧵

Hyper-commodified housing products and the triple crisis: regulating the symptom or rethinking housing provision? This paper argues that the regulation of co-living and short-term rental accommodation – identified as ‘hyper-commodified housing products’ (HCHPs) – faces an important hurdle. The hyper-commodific...

🤩So happy to see the first output of the HypeRent research project out!
In this OA paper, @douccap.bsky.social and I propose an analytical fmwk to make sense of the development and regulation of co-living and STRA, identified as hyper-commodified housing products.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Looks great, congrats guys!

Epstein Family Values • EQUATOR The billionaire patriarchs of the American far-right want to rule an economy of masters and servants

There are some characteristically fascinating points in this @melindacooper.bsky.social piece about the Epstein scandal, and what it reveals about the "master and servant" logic of the contemporary far right www.equator.org/articles/eps...

Brilliant to see this out!

@jennypickerill.bsky.social @kbrickell.bsky.social @gypjh2000.bsky.social @lsesociology.bsky.social @kings-sga.bsky.social

Out today @intellectbooks.bsky.social: 'Reconstructing the American Dream: Life Inside the Tiny House Nation' w/Ella Harris, Mel Nowicki & Cian Oba-Smith. Through photographic and ethnographic accounts of life in Texas tiny home communities, we examine the politics of 'going tiny' in the US today.

Why is WeWork’s disgraced founder still so investable?

Read @timwhite100.bsky.social's paper 'The non-death of Adam Neumann: Alt-exiting, serial-founding, and failing up in Silicon Valley venture capital' in @finandsoc.bsky.social ⤵️

"This is a system that rewards calculated and strategic deception, ruthlessness and self-enrichment. It is ambivalent to failure and blind to social harm".

Looks like it's going to be great - the Adam Neumann & WeWork story is pretty wild when you read about it

Flow, one of Andreessen Horowitz's major projects, led by Adam Neumann, is a big piece of the puzzle in Network State / tech fascism, this is an important paper and thank you to the author for bringing really solid analysis of it and making sure we keep this piece in mind.

Thank you Shanley, found our exchanges on the topic super helpful!

Ooh thanks Kean, will check it out!

Cheers Olivier! Too true

Thanks to @davvkamp.bsky.social, @shanley.com, @ojutel.bsky.social, @aminsamman.bsky.social and Nils Peters for their support & input!

New in @finandsoc.bsky.social: ‘The non-death of Adam Neumann’, unpacking the return of WeWork’s disgraced founder. It’s about Silicon Valley’s ambivalence to failure & fraud, and how venture capital rewards already-powerful, ruthless and deceptive serial founders. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Bringing ownership in: a conjunctural approach to venture capital valuations Abstract. High startup valuations are commonly perceived as expressions of venture capitalists’ (VCs) power. This study complicates this view and argues th

New in SER: Nils Peters shows soaring UK startup valuations in the 2010s were less about VC power & more about a struggle for ownership. Late‑stage funds pushed into early‑stage rounds, intensifying competition & a small elite captured outsized returns. doi.org/10.1093/ser/...

How liberals lost the internet | Robert Topinka In the first part of our series on digital politics, we look at how centrists have lost ground fighting disinformation – when the real battle is over emotion and attention, says digital media academic...

I am super proud of this 3 part series about digital politics by the brilliant Robert Topinka that I commissioned and edited.

First piece here about how liberals misread the rise of the right content platforms.The illos by Antoine Cossé are so good www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I enjoyed writing this in the great new issue of Renewal. It's an effort to think through how fighting the far right should be integrated with campaigns for economic alternatives in a "postneoliberal" context

Temporary accommodation in England is ‘torture’ for neurodivergent children, report finds Exclusive: Parents said their children had become withdrawn or hypervigilant because of uncertainty, unsafe environments and removal of support

“It’s like torture”: our new report reveals how Temporary Accommodation is harming neurodivergent children and families across the UK. Based on a nationwide call for evidence, it sets out urgent policy asks for change.

www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

Debt and disruption: South East Water’s creaking infrastructure and finances Under-fire utility paid almost as much in interest and dividends as it invested in the network in past 15 years

'Debt & Disruption: South East Water's creaking infrastructure & finances'. With background analysis and comment from me, in this @financialtimes.com article on South East Water www.ft.com/content/534a...

Now available for pre-order and we're open for book talks to students, workshops and conferences, organisations etc.
press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...