RERUN: Rent-Seeking Landscapes and Landscapes for Life with Raquel Rolnik

This week, we are digging one of our classic episodes from the archives - our conversation with the canonical critical and public urban scholar, Raquel Rolnik. Many of you may know Raquel for her critical scholarship and prominent defense of the right to house and the city. Based out of São Paulo, Raquel is professor at the Architecture and Urbanism Department at the University of São Paulo. She has held various government positions including Director of the Planning Department of São Paulo and National Secretary for Urban Programs of the Brazilian Ministry of Cities, and between 2008 and 2014, she was the UN Special Rapporteur on adequate housing. On this episode, we discussed one of her papers which we translated to rent-seeking landscapes, and landscapesfor life, which you can find here. She described how new financial instruments and technologies have transformed the way we produce or relate to housing. We discussed her views about  land value capture instruments, which have changed over the years... And Raquel ended by talking about how creativity and resistance, rather than planning, can create new possibilities and changeurban realities.