The new informality? The financialization of informal housing as a parasitic relation (2023) Plenary Commentary

This paper responds to Raquel Rolnik's Urban Geography Plenary Lecture, delivered at the 2023 American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, titled “The Empire Strikes Back.” Rolnik's essay introduces the idea that a “new informality” has begun in Latin American cities. She uses this concept to understand how financial innovations like digital platforms and state-backed rental assistance programs draw informal housing into bankable debt relations without needing to convert them into cadastral property. This paper uses Marx's distinction between formal and real subsumption, and Gidwani's theorization of the parasitism of capital, to reframe Rolnik's provocative argument via the noncapital–capital relation. It then raises three questions about the empirical “next steps” of research into the financialization of informal housing that need to be explored to understand the novelty of financialization in the global South. These pertain to (i) the normative logics governing racialized and other forms of difference upon which financialization feeds and depends, (ii) the scale at which financial innovations should be studied and the presumed coherence “high finance” should be granted as an analytical category, and (iii) the fictions used to generate and sustain political buy-in for financial capital's attempt to subsume/consume informal lifeworlds.