Through the lens of political economy, this book positions housing as a key factor in understanding social inequality. It does so by drawing on rich empirical evidence from the case of the Chilean housing market. This book provides insights on the articulation between real estate development, housing provision and social inequality based on applied urban economics analyses that illustrate the contradictions of neoliberal urbanism through the case of Chile. For neoliberal urbanism, the good city is not equal for all, it is based on the principle of profitability and benefits from segregation to make capital investment more efficient. The chapters of this book expose how these processes are generated by a political system that allows them rather than by the invisible hand of the market. The book will be of interest to graduate students in urban studies, urban planning, sociology and urban geography. It will also appeal to decision-makers and also to actors in the real estate market seeking to perfect the social benefits of their professional activities, aspiring to generate more egalitarian and just cities.

Many former members of the democratic opposition to the Augusto Pinochet regime (1973-1990) now find it difficult to separate its largely successful free-market economic model from the repressive political climate under which the model was implemented. Can the economic successes of the free-market model - based on policies recommended and implemented by the so-called Chicago boys for the former military government - survive after the restoration of civil, political and human rights in full? David E. Hojman addresses this key question and assesses the changes of economic - and political - success for the current administration of Patricio Aylwin and for future democratic governments.

In The Political Economy of Housing: The Case of Turkey, Sila Demirors explores the analytical and historical process of how housing, a special use-value and social relation, which is crucial for the social reproduction of labour-power, becomes an instrument of speculative finance to feed itself. While the second part of the book discusses the political economy of housing in Turkey, in which housing has been used by the state as both a political project and a macroeconomic tool for the last two decades, the first part of the book formulates a methodological and theoretical framework to provide a comprehensive approach for comparative housing research from a Marxist political economy perspective.

This book explores the relationship between recent theoretical debates around the fate of critique of neoliberal capitalism and critical theory, on the one hand, and the critical theories generated in and by social movements in Chile, on the other. By taking the idea of social critique as a field that encompasses both critical social theories and the practices of social criticism carried out by social movements, Resisting Neoliberal Capitalism in Chile explores how the student and the Pobladores movements map, resist and contest neoliberal capitalism in commodified areas such as education and housing in Chile, one of the first ‘neoliberal experiments’ in Latin America and the world.

Traces the history of the labor movement in Chile through the experiences of copper miners employed by the Anaconda Copper Company from 1945 to 1990. Covers the economic, political, and social history of the 45-year period when the Cold War dominated Chilean politics.