Dr Desiree Fields

Desiree is Assistant Professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her Visiting Fellowship at the UI built on her research around the role of housing in capitalist urbanization. She studies how efforts to render immovable property into liquid capital unevenly restructure urban space and social relations, and the urban struggles for justice that arise to contest this process of financialization. Her scholarship speaks to developments that are central to the future of cities: the growing importance of finance to capitalism, the turn to increasingly market-driven approaches to housing and urbanization, and the digital revolution.