Soutenance HDR de Francesca Artioli
Francesca Artioli soutiendra son habilitation à diriger des recherches le jeudi 19 mars 2026 intitulée « Tied to the Asset: Housing and the Politics of Rentier Cities. Italy in a European Perspective »
The manuscript starts from the observation, now widely established by the literature, that housing increasingly serves as an asset, i.e. something whose ownership and control generate an economic rent. While housing retains multiple purposes (a shelter, a place of kinship, etc.), its function as an asset has become widespread across different types of owners and uses. It has also become central to the socio-economic structures of European cities and countries. Housing asset ownership, and the economic returns from it, shape wealth, living conditions, and socio-spatial inequalities. The guiding hypothesis advanced by this manuscript is that, while this transformation is socio-economic, it is also a political one: it reorders urban and multi-level policies, interest groups, political allegiances and divides around the beneficiaries and losers of the extraction, accumulation, and appropriation of rent from property. To address this matter, the manuscript brings together an extensive critical review of the academic literature on the assetisation of housing across European cities in different housing systems/welfare regimes, combined with empirical analyses of Italy and Milan. The latter are conceived as a two-tier case study that examines Italy and, then, Milan in relation to the national Italian context, and situates both within the broader dynamics of European cities and countries.
The manuscript is organised into four chapters. This first chapter draws together various streams of research on housing that indicate that assetisation is now a well-established and comprehensive shift across multiple types of owners, uses, and contexts. It builds on this evidence to advance the idea of the rentierisation of European cities and politics, which captures the increasing centrality of housing property ownership and returns in shaping urban living conditions and economies, but also politics and public policies. It follows an ideal-typical reasoning that highlights the central features of the rentier city and politics, while discussing its limits and varieties across housing/welfare regimes and models of capitalism.
The second chapter sheds light on one variety of rentierisation. It examines how the Italian housing property ownership structure, familistic housing/welfare regime, and model of economic growth (tourism-led, stagnant wages) have led to the institutionalisation of a liberalised short-term rental sector over the past decade. On the one hand, it highlights the producers’ group in the STR sector and the role of Italian asset-owning families within it. On the other hand, it shows the socio-economic and territorial STR-led cumulative advantages and divides. By doing so, the chapter discusses the Italian case of “peripheral rentierisation” (Santos, 2025), its socio-economic and political supporters, and the territorial politics that now oppose a small number of cities and regions to the state.
Subsequently, based on Milan (i.e. a rentier city), the third chapter traces the policies and politics of housing ownership and returns since the 2010s, in three phases. It shows how housing assetisation was embedded in a model of entrepreneurial urban development, supported by a permissive consensus around the overall appreciation of housing. The second phase marks a crisis of this consensus in the early 2020s, as housing problems have intensified and mobilisations have emerged denouncing unaffordable housing and rent extraction. The third phase corresponds to the development of a municipal housing policy response that reflects a path dependency linked to the appreciation of Milan’s built environment, and that seeks to provide some below-market housing solutions while preserving asset-based returns for owners and investors. The analysis also shows how the representation of individual property owners becomes instrumental in this regime. It highlights in particular the strength of the narrative around the “small owner” (despite strong data opacity), as well as the hollow and fragmented representation of property organisations.
Chapter 4 connects this manuscript with Volume 1 to outline a research agenda around the politics of privately owned housing and rent extraction, between assetisation, housing rights, and the climate crisis. It presents four research areas around housing taxation, the regulation of housing uses, property ownership data, and climate housing policies.
Altogether, the HDR original manuscript connects the rise of housing as an asset to an ordinary rentierisation of urban and multi-level politics, in which individual owners play a key role. It thus offers insight into the multiple connections that make urban policies and governance “tied to the asset”. By doing so, it establishes housing and property ownership as a structuring dimension of urban governance rather than a purely sectoral policy field.
Jury :
Massimo Bricocoli, Professeur, Politecnico de Milan
Xavier Desjardins, Professeur, Sorbonne Université
Marie-Pierre Lefeuvre, Professeure, Université de Tours
Renaud Le Goix, Professeur, Université Paris Cité (rapporteur)
Gilles Pinson, Professeur, Sciences Po Bordeaux (rapporteur)
Tuna Taşan-Kok, Professeure, Université d’Amsterdam (rapporteure)
Christine Lelévrier, Professeure, Université Paris-Est-Créteil (garante)
Quand ? Jeudi 19 mars à 13h30
Où ? Salle A219 (plot A, 2ème étage), Bâtiment Bienvenue, 14-15 Boulevard Newton, Champs-sur-Marne
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