Zac J. Taylor: From Liquidity to Fixity? Climate Risk and the Remaking of Transnational Real Estate Finance

Abstract

Real estate financialization is sustained through the reproduction of "liquidity out of spatial fixity" — on a wide number of networked practices through which homes and other geographically fixed assets are transformed into liquid, exchangeable market objects. But climate risks and their management are quickly disrupting the transnational real estate-finance system. This talk examines how real estate-finance institutions on Wall Street define and instrumentalize understandings of climate risk and contemplates what this mean for how — and for whom — climate risks are taken up on Main Street. 

Biography 

Zac Taylor is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at Delft University of Technology. Their work examines how financial institutions manage climate risk in the built environment, and what this means for equitable urban climate transitions. Taylor co-leads Red&Blue: Real Estate Development in Low Urban Environments, a transdisciplinary research platform focused on the development of integrated climate risk strategies in the Netherlands. Taylor's work has been featured in The New York Times and The Economist, and has been published in academic journals including Environment and Planning A and Annals of the American Association Geographers.