Raquel Rolnik: “Finance has taken over built spaces”

By  | 2017

Raquel Rolnik discusses how finance has taken over built spaces in cities around the world. There has been a paradigm shift where states, through new housing policies, have dismantled the existing ones that provided social housing and regulated rent markets. Society was exposed to the international speculative game of finance, where the response of the governments to the financial crisis included the rent sector as a new frontier of financial capital, blocking people’s access to housing.

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Raquel Rolnik is an architect and urbanist and a professor at the School of Architecture and Urbanism at USP. She was special rapporteur for the UN Human Rights Council for the Right to Adequate Housing, for two terms (2008-2011, 2011-2014). She was Planning Director of the City of São Paulo (1989-1992), Urbanisation Coordinator of the Pólis Institute (1997-2002) and National Secretary of Urban Programs of the Ministry of Cities (2003-2007), among other professional and didactic activities related to urban and housing policy.