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This article sets out a conceptual/operational framework designed to analyse how the state has enabled, promoted and shaped housing financialization. We build on the systematic analysis of literature and legislation in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece, thereby providing an overview of housing financialization in Southern Europe. We identify six modes of housing financialization (mortgage debt, mortgage securitization, social rented housing, market rental housing, housing companies, "not-for-housing housing"), characterized by relative autonomy and specific mechanisms, plus a number of cross-cutting dimensions. Our conceptual/operational framework allows to systematically inquiry whether the state has passively adapted to global transformations or shaped these transformations in turn, therefore advancing two main contributions: first, contributing to a more precise conceptualization of the mechanisms of housing financialization; and, second, providing operational instruments to explore state action and policy in housing financialization beyond Southern Europe., Funding Agencies|Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia [PTDC/GES-URB/28826/2017]; Simone Tulumellos contract (FCT) [CEECINST/00045/2021/CP2818/CT0002]

Tra l’agosto del 1953 e il giugno del 1954 Arnold Leonard Epstein condusse un’indagine antropologica a Luanshya, città mineraria del Copperbelt (attuale Zambia), con l’intento di analizzare la formazione di alcune istituzioni giuridico-amministrative locali. Tra la fine degli anni Ottanta e i primi anni Duemila, Loïc Wacquant ha condotto una serie di ricerche teoriche ed empiriche volte a comprendere fenomeni riconducibili alla frammentazione sociale e alla povertà urbana tra Chicago e Parigi. I testi qui presentati sono frammenti dei frutti di queste inchieste etnografiche, i risultati delle quali, certamente lontani gli uni dagli altri, sono in grado, tuttavia, di mostrare un ipotetico percorso che l’antropologia ha intrapreso nel suo relazionarsi alle realtà urbane, mettendo in luce le continuità e le discontinuità da un punto di vista sia metodologico sia teorico sia del posizionamento del ricercatore nei confronti dei contesti indagati.

Critical geography and political economy have long assumed that the financialization of housing is a process especially typical of global cities of the North. More recently, increasing attention has been dedicated to financialization in the Global South as well (e.g. Aalbers et al., 2020). Manuel Aalbers (2019, p. 377), however, has recently argued that ‘housing financialization, or any other form of financialization for that matter, is not primarily about showing which place is more financialized; it is about understanding the process by which financial actors, markets, practices, measurements, and narratives are increasingly becoming dominant’. In other words, a regional approach is not so much relevant in terms of creating global ‘rankings’ of financialized cities and places, but to the extent that it allows to explore the forms and ways through which (global) capital intermingle and struggle with local institutional, social and political arrangements.

Critical geography and political economy have long assumed that the financialization of housing is a process especially typical of global cities of the North. More recently, increasing attention has been dedicated to financialization in the Global South as well (e.g. Aalbers et al., 2020). Manuel Aalbers (2019, p. 377), however, has recently argued that ‘housing financialization, or any other form of financialization for that matter, is not primarily about showing which place is more financialized; it is about understanding the process by which financial actors, markets, practices, measurements, and narratives are increasingly becoming dominant’. In other words, a regional approach is not so much relevant in terms of creating global ‘rankings’ of financialized cities and places, but to the extent that it allows to explore the forms and ways through which (global) capital intermingle and struggle with local institutional, social and political arrangements.

The collective editorial discusses inequalities that scholars in Europe and the Americas world have paid attention to during 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic has unevenly and unpredictably impacted on societies. The critical reflections reveal that the continuing ramifications of the pandemic can only be understood in place; like other large-scale phenomena, this exceptional global crisis concretizes very differently in distinct national, regional and local contexts. The pandemic intertwines with ongoing challenges in societies, for example those related to poverty, armed conflicts, migration, racism, natural hazards, corruption and precarious labor. Through collective contextual understanding, the editorial invites further attention to the unequal geographies made visible and intensified by the current pandemic.

The collective editorial discusses inequalities that scholars in Europe and the Americas world have paid attention to during 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic has unevenly and unpredictably impacted on societies. The critical reflections reveal that the continuing ramifications of the pandemic can only be understood in place; like other large-scale phenomena, this exceptional global crisis concretizes very differently in distinct national, regional and local contexts. The pandemic intertwines with ongoing challenges in societies, for example those related to poverty, armed conflicts, migration, racism, natural hazards, corruption and precarious labor. Through collective contextual understanding, the editorial invites further attention to the unequal geographies made visible and intensified by the current pandemic.

The collective editorial discusses inequalities that scholars in Europe and the Americas world have paid attention to during 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic has unevenly and unpredictably impacted on societies. The critical reflections reveal that the continuing ramifications of the pandemic can only be understood in place; like other large-scale phenomena, this exceptional global crisis concretizes very differently in distinct national, regional and local contexts. The pandemic intertwines with ongoing challenges in societies, for example those related to poverty, armed conflicts, migration, racism, natural hazards, corruption and precarious labor. Through collective contextual understanding, the editorial invites further attention to the unequal geographies made visible and intensified by the current pandemic.

The collective editorial discusses inequalities that scholars in Europe and the Americas world have paid attention to during 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic has unevenly and unpredictably impacted on societies. The critical reflections reveal that the continuing ramifications of the pandemic can only be understood in place; like other large-scale phenomena, this exceptional global crisis concretizes very differently in distinct national, regional and local contexts. The pandemic intertwines with ongoing challenges in societies, for example those related to poverty, armed conflicts, migration, racism, natural hazards, corruption and precarious labor. Through collective contextual understanding, the editorial invites further attention to the unequal geographies made visible and intensified by the current pandemic.

The Segment Routing (SR) architecture is based on loose source routing. A list of instructions, called segments can be added to the packet headers, to influence the forwarding and the processing of the packets in an SR enabled network. In SRv6 (Segment Routing over IPv6 data plane) the segments are represented with IPv6 addresses, which are 16 bytes long. There are some SRv6 service scenarios that may require to carry a large number of segments in the IPv6 packet headers. This can be inefficient due to the overheads of the segment list, or can even cause processing issues in the crossed nodes due to the very large header to be processed. In this paper we present the Micro SID solution for the efficient representation of segment identifiers. With this solution, the length of the segment list can be drastically reduced., Comment: Extended version (v1) of submitted paper - October 2020

Programmable data planes recently emerged as a prominent innovation in Software Defined Networking (SDN), by permitting support of stateful flow processing functions over hardware network switches specifically designed for network processing. Unlike early SDN solutions such as OpenFlow, modern stateful data planes permit to keep (and dynamically update) local per-flow states inside network switches, thus dramatically improving reactiveness of network applications to state changes. Still, also in stateful data planes, the control and update of non-local states is assumed to be completely delegated to a centralized controller and thus accessed only at the price of extra delay. Our LOADER proposal aims at contrasting the apparent dichotomy between local states and global states. We do so by introducing a new possibility: permit to take localized (in-switch) decisions not only on local states but also on replicated global states, thus providing support for network-wide applications without incurring the drawbacks of classical approaches. To this purpose, i) we provide high-level programming abstractions devised to define the states and the update logic of a generic network-wide application, and ii) we detail the underlying low level state management and replication mechanisms. We then show LOADER's independence of the stateful data plane technology employed, by implementing it over two distinct stateful data planes (P4 switches and OPP - Open Packet Processor - switches), and by experimentally validating both implementations in an emulated testbed using a simple distributed Deny-of-Service (DoS) detection application.

Simone met Ananya on the morning of July 13, 2018, during the Congress of AESOP, the Association of European Schools of Planning, where Ananya gave the opening keynote speech, titled “Plans for freedom: Borders, cities and the struggle for justice in the age of Trumpism”. The conversation lasted approximately 40 minutes and was based on, but at moments diverged from, a number of questions jointly prepared by Simone and Giacomo. Starting from the double nature of the margin in Ananya’s work – margin as method and as object of study – the conversation then touched issues of race in the making of the contemporary city, mostly in the USA and the Global South. We also discussed representations of urban margins as places of resistance and creativity; and then questioned the return of the nation state in producing, and enforcing, (racial, gendered, class...) margins. Inspired by the topic of the AESOP congress, “Making space for hope”, we concluded by reflecting on the paths for building alternatives to the status quo, reflecting on activist and engaged research practices. By questioning the frequent romanticizing of the local, Ananya reflected on the need for a global scale in thinking change. The following is a transcription of the conversation, lightly edited for clarity, consistence and style.

This chapter provides an overview of the field of housing politics in contemporary Lisbon: the transition from the end of a period of economic crisis and deep austerity to a fast economic growth based on exportation, tourism and real estate; the intersection of historical housing problems with new trends of financialisation, touristification and gentrification; and growth of social movements concerned with the right to housing and to the city. By reflecting on housing crisis and struggles, the chapter takes two conceptual steps. On the one hand, by building on an understanding of austerity as the downloading of vulnerability to risk from the economic to the social sphere, it explores the entrenchment of austerity in the field of housing. On the other hand, by questioning the capacity of emerging social movements to fight the social vulnerability brought by austerity, it questions social movements’ potential to establish themselves as a ‘resilient’ alternative to the dominant models of economic development.

Simone met Ananya on the morning of July 13, 2018, during the Congress of AESOP, the Association of European Schools of Planning, where Ananya gave the opening keynote speech, titled “Plans for freedom: Borders, cities and the struggle for justice in the age of Trumpism”. The conversation lasted approximately 40 minutes and was based on, but at moments diverged from, a number of questions jointly prepared by Simone and Giacomo. Starting from the double nature of the margin in Ananya’s work – margin as method and as object of study – the conversation then touched issues of race in the making of the contemporary city, mostly in the USA and the Global South. We also discussed representations of urban margins as places of resistance and creativity; and then questioned the return of the nation state in producing, and enforcing, (racial, gendered, class...) margins. Inspired by the topic of the AESOP congress, “Making space for hope”, we concluded by reflecting on the paths for building alternatives to the status quo, reflecting on activist and engaged research practices. By questioning the frequent romanticizing of the local, Ananya reflected on the need for a global scale in thinking change. The following is a transcription of the conversation, lightly edited for clarity, consistence and style.

This article explores the role of changing arrangements of multi-level territorial governance in the European Cohesion Policy. It hypothesises the existence of a temporal duality between successful/unsuccessful phases of Cohesion Policy between the 1990s and 2000s, that is, a structural change in the implementation of Structural Funds stemming from the reforms at the turn of the millennium. The article seeks to understand the implications of such a duality using case study analysis, with the theoretical aim of exploring in-depth the connections between the European and the local scale. It analyses in the long term (1994-2013) the use of Structural Funds for urban development in a specific context, the city of Palermo in the Objective 1 region of Sicily, under-explored by international literature. The phases of Structural Funds are understood in the wider context of Palermo, Sicily and Southern Italy, emphasising the temporal coherence between (i) the phases of autonomous/dependent development, (ii) evolution/involution in the implementation of cohesion policies, and (iii) shifting multi-level territorial governance arrangements. The local case confirms the duality hypothesised and, based on this, wider considerations for the future of Cohesion Policy are set out.

This article explores the role of changing arrangements of multi-level territorial governance in the European Cohesion Policy. It hypothesises the existence of a temporal duality between successful/unsuccessful phases of Cohesion Policy between the 1990s and 2000s, that is, a structural change in the implementation of Structural Funds stemming from the reforms at the turn of the millennium. The article seeks to understand the implications of such a duality using case study analysis, with the theoretical aim of exploring in-depth the connections between the European and the local scale. It analyses in the long term (1994-2013) the use of Structural Funds for urban development in a specific context, the city of Palermo in the Objective 1 region of Sicily, under-explored by international literature. The phases of Structural Funds are understood in the wider context of Palermo, Sicily and Southern Italy, emphasising the temporal coherence between (i) the phases of autonomous/dependent development, (ii) evolution/involution in the implementation of cohesion policies, and (iii) shifting multi-level territorial governance arrangements. The local case confirms the duality hypothesised and, based on this, wider considerations for the future of Cohesion Policy are set out.

This blog entry discusses the use of a ‘quasi-quantitative’ mapping method as part of comparative case-study research for a PhD, in the context of (unforeseen) constraints and scarce resources. Specifically, I present the challenges I faced working in different contexts, with different resources and in different temporal windows – and the subsequent processes of adaptation of the research design. First, I introduce the PhD research to ground the decision to use maps. Second, I discuss how a method designed for the city where I carried out my PhD (Palermo, Italy) was partially delusional in the city where I developed a second case-study (Lisbon, Portugal) and how I had to steer the research design as a consequence. Third, I reflect on the implications of a (too?) ambitious research design and summarise the lessons I have learnt with broader relevance for comparative case-study research, writes Simone Tulumello