Atelierul de Critică Socială at the Faculty of European Studies, and Căși sociale ACUM!/ Social housing NOW!/ Desire Foundation are honored to host professor Manuel Aalbers in Cluj. We are eager to learn about his analytical perspective in order to better understand the trends of current urban development in Cluj.

Aalbers is Professor at Social and Economic Geography, KU Leuven, and coordinator of the Real Estate/Financial Complex research project. His main research interest is the intersection of real estate (including housing), finance and states. Manuel has published on redlining, social and financial exclusion, neighbourhood change (including decline and gentrification), the privatization of social housing and the Anglophone hegemony in academia. He is the author of Place, Exclusion, and Mortgage Markets (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) and The Financialization of Housing (Routledge, 2016) as well as the editor of Subprime Cities: The Political Economy of Mortgage Markets (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

We are inviting you to his public lecture about how financialization affects the city in contemporary global capitalism and how it functions at the urban scale, while connecting the analytical paradigm of financialization to other theorizations of urban development. Aalbers connects various stages of urban governance: post-war urban managerialism, entrepreneurial urbanism, financialized urbanism.

Come for a discussion with him on these subjects while trying to adopt this analytical paradigm to the recent development of Cluj.