Aretousa Bloom

Aretousa is an LSE Fellow in Urban Geography at the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is broadly interested in understanding transformations in the nature of contemporary capitalism, with a focus on how the logics of finance and speculation are reshaping urban and social life

Her recent research focuses on housing financialisation, state transformation, and urban climate politics, and her broader and emerging interests are in cultural economy, the social studies of finance, critical logistics, and energy geographies.

Aretousa holds a PhD in Planning and Public Policy from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, an MSc in Community and Regional Planning from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BA in Architecture from the University of Cambridge. Before joining LSE, she completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship funded by the Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius Foundation at Uppsala University, Sweden, and has taught and researched at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Queen Mary University of London.

Research interests

• Housing
• Climate politics
• Financialisation

Selected publications

• Bloom, A., & Penny, J. (2026). Claiming social housing futures: Value, risk and the temporal politics of income strip financing in London. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 1-19. http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.70093
• Bloom, A. (2024). Labour, financialization, and rent in the construction industry: Towards a hybrid framework of accumulation. Housing, Theory and Society, 41(1), 47–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/14036096.2023.2292591
• Bloom, A. (2024). Public land, value capture, and the rise of speculative urban governance in post-crisis London. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 56(6), 1771-1786. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X231199701
• Bloom, A. (2023). Value ‘stripping’: Affordable housing, institutional investment, and the political economy of municipal debt. European Urban and Regional Studies, 30(1), 66-71. https://doi.org/10.1177/09697764221123929

Media

• Bloom, A. (2024). At the water’s edge: Maritime struggles, logistical urbanisation, and the fight for the port of Piraeus. Berliner Gazette. https://berlinergazette.de/at-the-waters-edge-maritime-struggles-logistical-urbanization-and-the-fight-for-the-port-of-piraeus/