Cultivating Credit: Financialized Urbanization Is Alienation!
Keywords: 
financialization; property; settler colonialism; Palestine studies; geography; urban studies; Native American and Indigenous studies
Abstract: 

Since 2007, the Palestinian Authority has implemented a strategy of financialized urbanization in response to economic crises precipitated by Israel’s settler-colonial stranglehold on the Palestinian economy. This article argues that financialized urbanization operates as a mechanism to expand the local banking sector and as a modality of settler-colonial alienation. Examining the joint-ownership structures of companies whose activities straddle real estate and financial markets, the article shows where land ownership in the West Bank ultimately lies. The study highlights qualitative changes in money lending and the extended reach of finance to emphasize the risks of financial collapse. Understanding finance capital and settler colonialism as systems predicated on managing risk for maximum returns, the discussion draws their relation to each other into a single analytical framework to center the question of land dispossession and racialization at the heart of financialized urbanization.

Author biography: 
Tareq Radi is a doctoral student in American studies at New York University. He is currently preparing a dissertation that examines the financialization of housing in the West Bank as a process of financial and social reengineering rooted within a settler-colonial history of U.S. real estate development and empire building in Palestine.