Affordable housing, finance and the state: Towards a global urban comparison

Tom Gillespie, Glyn Williams, Raffael Beier, Antoine Gosnet (), Margherita Grazioli, Thomas Purcell, Jie Shen and Callum Ward
Additional contact information
Tom Gillespie: University of Manchester [Manchester]
Glyn Williams: Lund University, WITS - University of the Witwatersrand [Johannesburg]
Raffael Beier: TU - Technische Universität Dortmund = TU Dortmund University
Antoine Gosnet: EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales, GC (UMR_8504) - Géographie-cités - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - UPCité - Université Paris Cité
Margherita Grazioli: GSSI - Gran Sasso Science Institute
Thomas Purcell: King‘s College London
Jie Shen: Fudan University [Shanghai]
Callum Ward: University of Sheffield [Sheffield]

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Abstract: The scale of the 21st-century urban housing challenge has prompted state actors in both the Global North and South to adopt increasingly interventionist approaches to ‘affordable' housing production. This article draws on research in six cities (Shanghai, Nairobi, Paris, Casablanca, Salford and Rome) to discuss the changing relationship between housing, finance and the state through a global comparative perspective. It adopts an urban statecraft lens to examine affordable housing production as a site through which state actors engage with financialisation processes to different extents, leading to the reconfiguration of the state in the process. From this exploratory comparison, the paper identifies three dimensions of statecraft across which state-led affordable housing production can be analysed: state motivations to intervene; the forms of financial and institutional innovation adopted by policymakers; and strategies to redistribute and mitigate the risks associated with financialisation processes. In proposing these dimensions, the central contribution of the article is to establish an analytical framework for further empirical research on the uneven geographies of the global state-housing-finance nexus.

Date: 2026
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-05595452v1
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Published in Urban Studies, 2026, ⟨10.1177/00420980261436336⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-05595452

DOI: 10.1177/00420980261436336

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