García-Lamarca Melissa, Kaika Maria
Geography School of Environment, Education and Development University of Manchester Manchester M13 9PL.
Trans Inst Br Geogr. 2016 Jul;41(3):313-327. doi: 10.1111/tran.12126. Epub 2016 Jun 1.
The paper expands the conceptual framework within which we examine mortgage debt by reconceptualising mortgages as a biotechnology: a technology of power over life that forges an intimate relationship between global financial markets, everyday life and human labour. Taking seriously the materiality of mortgage contracts as a means of forging new embodied practices of financialisation, we urge for the need to move beyond a policy- and macroeconomics-based analysis of housing financialisation. We argue that more attention needs to be paid to how funnelling land-related capital flows goes hand in hand with signing off significant parts of future labour, decisionmaking capacity and well-being to mortgage debt repayments. The paper offers two key insights. First, it exemplifies how macroeconomic and policy changes could not have led to the financialisation of housing markets without a parallel biopolitical process that mobilised mortgage contracts to integrate the social reproduction of the workforce into speculative global real-estate practices. Second, it expands the framework of analysis of emerging literature on financialisation and subjectification. Focusing on the mortgage defaults and evictions crisis in Spain, we document how during Spain's 1997-2007 real-estate boom the promise of mortgages as a means to optimise income and wealth enrolled livelihoods into cycles of global financial and real-estate speculation, as home security and future wealth became directly dependent on the fluctuations of financial products, interest rates and capital accumulation strategies rooted in the built environment. When, after 2008 unemployment escalated and housing prices collapsed, mortgages became a punitive technology that led to at least 500 000 foreclosures and over 250 000 evictions in Spain.
本文通过将抵押贷款重新概念化为一种生物技术，扩展了我们审视抵押贷款债务的概念框架：这是一种掌控生命的技术，它在全球金融市场、日常生活和人类劳动之间建立了一种密切关系。我们认真对待抵押贷款合同的物质性，将其视为形成金融化新具体实践的一种手段，因此敦促超越基于政策和宏观经济学的住房金融化分析。我们认为，需要更多地关注与土地相关的资本流动如何与将未来劳动、决策能力和福祉的很大一部分用于偿还抵押贷款债务紧密相连。本文提供了两个关键见解。第一，它例证了如果没有一个平行的生命政治过程，宏观经济和政策变化不可能导致住房市场的金融化，这个生命政治过程利用抵押贷款合同将劳动力的社会再生产纳入投机性的全球房地产实践。第二，它扩展了关于金融化和主体化的新兴文献的分析框架。以西班牙的抵押贷款违约和驱逐危机为重点，我们记录了在西班牙1997 - 2007年房地产繁荣期间，抵押贷款作为优化收入和财富手段的承诺如何将生计纳入全球金融和房地产投机周期，因为住房保障和未来财富直接依赖于金融产品的波动、利率以及基于建筑环境的资本积累策略。2008年之后，当失业率上升且房价暴跌时，抵押贷款成为一种惩罚性技术，在西班牙导致至少50万起房屋止赎和超过25万起驱逐事件。
