Social Science Matrix Podcast: Desiree Fields

In this episode, Professor Michael Watts interviews Desiree Fields, an assistant professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Fields' research explores the financial technologies, market devices, and historical and geographic contingencies that make it possible to treat housing as a financial asset, and how this process is contested at the urban scale. At the heart of her work is an interest in how economic and transformations unevenly restructure urban space and social relations, with a particular concern for how urban struggles for justice coalesce around these changes. Within this broadly defined area, she examines two transformations as they relate to housing, a crucial vector of urban inequality and terrain of grassroots political contestation. First, the shift to a finance-oriented political economy; second, the growing global reach and power of digital platforms.

She is currently studying how platform business models are being developed for rental housing markets in San Francisco, London, and Berlin, and how activists are developing counter-platforms in pursuit of housing justice. A recent project investigated the emergence of corporate landlords in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, their development of new financial assets backed by rent checks, and how the tools of the post-2008 tech boom aided this process.

Fields has published widely on the relationships among housing financialization, movements for justice, and digital platforms in journals like Economic Geography; Housing, Theory, and Society; International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and; Urban Studies. She also regularly publishes reports, working papers, and essays with community groups like Right to the City and Greater Manchester Housing Action, and in venues ranging from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco to Public Books. The National Science Foundation, British Academy, and Independent Social Research Foundation have supported her work.

A transcript of this interview is available at: https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/matrix-podcast-interview-with-desiree-fields/