This book launch discussed how our homes and neighbourhoods have become the “last subprime frontiers of capitalism’.

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Raquel Rolnik’s new book Urban Warfare: Housing under the empire of finance explores how financialisation has colonised cities and housing systems around the world, provoking homelessness and dispossession despite its promise of homeownership for all. The book examines housing politics and policy from numerous national contexts including the UK, Kazakhstan, Chile, the USA and Brazil. Rolnik offers a searing critique of the political economy of housing under neoliberalism and a poignant analysis of how it has decimated households across the globe, as well as an account of how residents and social movements are fighting back.

Raquel Rolnik is Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo. A widely-published academic and writer, she has also served as Director of the Planning Department of the city of São Paulo, National Secretary for Urban Programmes of the Brazilian Ministry of Cities, Urban Policy Coordinator of the NGO Polis Institute and United Nations Special Rapporteur on adequate housing.

Glyn Robbins is a long-time housing worker and activist with Defend Council Housing, and holds a PhD in urban policy. He is the author of There's No Place: The American housing crisis and what it means for the UK. His articles about housing and urban policy appear regularly in the labour movement and housing press and have also been published by The Guardian.

David Madden is Associate Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Cities Programme at LSE. He is co-author, with Peter Marcuse, of In Defense of Housing: The politics of crisis. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Jacobin, and the Washington Post.

Suzanne Hall is Associate Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Cities Programme at LSE. She is the author of City, Street and Citizen: The measure of the ordinary and co-editor, with Ricky Burdett, of The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City.

Established in 1904, the Department of Sociology @LSEsociology at LSE is committed to empirically rich, conceptually sophisticated, and socially and politically relevant research and scholarship. Building upon the traditions of the discipline, we play a key role in the development of the social sciences into the new intellectual areas, social problems, and ethical dilemmas that face our society today.

The hashtag for this event is #LSEUrbanWarfare