"Putting industrial workers front and center in urban political ecology, this book opens up exciting new pathways for understanding land financialization from a historical materialist perspective."—Stefania Barca, author of Workers of the Earth
"In this wonderful book, Maria Kaika and Luca Ruggiero show an unusual capacity to integrate localized historical research with powerful theoretical insights about capitalism, land financialization, and circuits of capital. Before the eureka moment when industrial land was reinvented as an asset, trouble had been brewing for decades. The authors bring to light the symbolic and social dimensions of the destruction/creation process, the long-term lived experience of land financialization, where land use and assetization have been transformative for the locality."—Patrick Le Galès, CNRS Research Professor, Sciences Po Urban School and Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics
"Land is nothing without the labor and laborers who have produced it, live in it, give it meaning, and create its value. As Class Meets Land makes vibrantly clear, what we take to be entirely deracinated—land as a financial asset—is instead the very embodiment of a long history of class struggle. Required reading for anyone who wants to really know what financialization is all about."—Don Mitchell, author of Mean Streets: Homelessness, Public Space, and the Limits of Capital