Governance, Housing, Financialisation, Inequalities : Comparing London and Paris

Speaker:

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Professor Patrick Le Galès (Sciences Po Paris, Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics)

Patrick Le Galès, FBA, MAE, is CNRS (National Scientific Research Centre) Research Professor of  Politics, Sociology,  and Urban Studies at Sciences Po Paris, Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics. He was the founding Dean of Sciences Po Urban School (2015-2022). His work deals with comparative public policy, state restructuring, urban sociology, comparative urban governance of large metropolis, mobility and urban class making, political economy. He was the editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and the president of SASE (Society for Advanced Socio-economics). He is co-editor of the European Journal of Sociology. He is a visiting professor at the University of Waseda (Spring 2023).

His publications include European Cities, conflicts, Governance (OUP, 2002), "Understanding public policy through its instruments—From the nature of instruments to the sociology of public policy instrumentation." Special issue Governance, 20(1) (with P.Lascoumes), Globalised Minds, Roots in the city, European Urban Middle classes (Wyley, 2015); Reconfiguring European States in Crisis (with D.King, OUP, 2017);  Gouverner la métropole parisienne, Paris Presses de Sciences Po 2021, Handbook of Comparative Global Urban Studies, (with J.Robinson), Routledge, forthcoming 2023. He is currently working on a book on the governance of large metropolis.

Abstract:

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Housing has become a major vehicle for wealth making, wealth accumulation, wealth storing an instrument to prepare for unemployment and retirement for households way for financial actors to diversify portfolio income. The financialization of housing is driven by state policy, capital market developments, city governments, intermediaries and transnational financial institutions. This talk contrasts the case of London and Paris based upon original research and data on public policies and transnational investments. In a way, Paris and London are very similar. Analysis of the financialization of offices, student housing or logistic parks is very comparable in terms of financialization trend and openness to transnational capital. By contrast, the case of housing shows major differences that have to be explained by public policies and two different forms of state-led strategies for the financialisation of housing. The talk concludes with the impact of those changes on class-making and inequalities.