You were a postdoc at Lund University in 2018-2019, welcome back to Lund! You have been at the Pufendorf IAS during April and May, what plans did you have for your visit?
Having the opportunity to return to Lund is extremely exciting for me. As part of my Nord IAS Fellowship, I will be able to finalize my paper on green debt in the selected Swedish municipalities and give a seminar in which I look forward to receiving feedback from scholars at Pufendorf IAS, Lund University, and Malmö University. In addition to conducting a number of interviews, I plan to meet with members of the Nordic Urban Political Economy Network (NUPE) based in Malmö, Lund, and Copenhagen to discuss a workshop that will take place in Helsinki in late September and to meet with scholars for future collaborations.
You are currently a Collegium Fellow at Turku Advanced Studies Institute (TIAS) and the Department of Sociology, University of Turku – can you tell us a little about what this means and what you are working on there?
TIAS has a community of interdisciplinary researchers selected from an international competition for early-career and mid-career fellows. As a Collegium Fellow at TIAS, I am a senior researcher. Fellows of TIAS are also affiliated with departments that best suit their research interests, and I am affiliated with the Discipline of Sociology in Social Research. Therefore, I have two homes at the University of Turku, which gives me the opportunity to interact with a broader group of colleagues with a variety of research interests. I am currently completing my articles and beginning to write my book, which draws upon my previous research on housing activism and urban social movements in Istanbul, including themes related to activist research methods, new forms of urban justice movements under financialization, and state responses to housing activism. Aside from my previous projects, I am currently working on two ongoing projects at TIAS. Firstly, a FORMAS-funded project entitled "The Emergence of Municipal-led Green Financialization of Urban Development in Sweden" focusing on the impacts of green municipal bonds in financialization of municipalities in Sweden. Secondly, the TIAS-funded project on 'Green Financialization of Urban Development in Finland' examines how social and green bonds are impacting Finnish city governance. In both of my new projects, I am examining different forms of "green" financial tools for funding the transition of cities to a sustainable future in the context of economic and climate crises within Swedish and Finnish municipalities.
Your research interests have largely been focused on housing, state interventions and political economy of urban development and change. You have done extensive work on social sustainability of urban transformations in the Global South and looked at urban social movements. Currently, you are also pursuing studies on green/climate financialization in Sweden and Finland. What has led you to investigate this new form of financialization? And how is it connected to your previous research?
Housing has been the focus of my work in terms of its financialization; housing movements; the role of the local and national government in housing provision and policy; and practices of urban commoning in Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey. As an activist researcher, I have been engaged in longitudinal research on Istanbul since 2004 by actively participating in urban social movements. As I have lived in the Nordics for more than six years now, I am interested in learning more about the cities and countries I have been living in. It is always a pleasure for an urbanist to explore the cities they have lived in as part of their research, since the changes in the city are also an integral part of your daily life and you have a lens through which you can observe city development from a critical perspective when conducting research. Since I have worked on the financialization of housing and urban development, I found the green twist in the financialization of urban development in Sweden and Finland to be particularly interesting. The Nordic cities are distinguished by their role as forerunners when it comes to the use and labeling of the first 'green municipal bonds'. As a scholar who also writes on local state theory, Nordic cities provide me with the opportunity to explore how local government is transforming from a social welfare model to one that is more entrepreneurial, characterized by green financialization. In both of my ongoing projects I am focusing on the financialization of sustainable urban development and transitions, as well as the potential economic risks and social inequalities associated with innovative financial tools.
You are also the co-founder and coordinator of NUPE, Nordic Urban Political Economy and IIPPE, International Initiative for Promoting Political Economy – can you say something about your work and the purpose of these initiatives?
I am a co-founder and the coordinator of both initiatives. While IIPPE was establishing itself, the working groups model was adapted to organize our annual conference and to keep scholars and activists active beyond the conference through our working groups. In order to foster intellectual and political exchanges and collaboration between researchers and activists, the Urban and Regional Political Economy Working Group (URPE WG) was created in 2009. Therefore, URPE WG not only offers a space for researchers, but also promotes interaction between researchers and activists. The NUPE was established in 2020 in response to a need for scholars with a critical urban political economy approach to urban change and development in Nordic cities to gather annually, share and discuss their work, and collaborate. In addition to providing a platform for debates and discussions decentering established perspectives, NUPE initiates interdisciplinary research on critical urban political economy and examine current topics and core areas where profound changes are being observed across the Nordic countries. We have 35 members who come from a broad spectrum of disciplines, including human and economic geography, urban studies, urban and regional planning, architecture, urban sociology, anthropology, and political ecology, located both in Nordic countries and abroad. Our group organizes sessions at the Nordic Geographers Meeting (NGM), as well as a workshop every year. Across both initiatives, we have scholars at varying career stages and backgrounds. Those who share the interest of these initiatives are welcome to become members.
More information in connection to this article
NORDIAS is a network of all the Institutes for Advanced Studies (IASs) in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden (including Pufendorf IAS).
Read more about NORDIAS on their webpage (opens in a new window)
Read more about UPE, Nordic Urban Political Economy on their website (opens in a new window)