Two PhD Candidates: the Making of Havana’s Property Market at KU Leuven

The Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Division of Geography & Tourism at KU Leuven (Belgium) is looking for two full-time PhD candidates for 4 years. Together you will work on the research project "The Making of Havana’s Property Market", which is part of the "Real Estate/Financial Complex" (REFCOM) research group, coordinated by dr. Manuel B. Aalbers. REFCOM is an internationally comparative and transdisciplinary research group looking into the increasing interconnectedness of real estate and finance, and the role of states, politics and institutions. This particular research project is funded by Research Foundation Flanders (see fwo.be).

This study aims to reconstruct Cuba’s economic transition with a particular focus on the making of the property market in the country’s capital city of Havana. The emerging literature on the globalization of real estate has addressed how internationally circulating capital has increasingly found its ways into the property markets of the ‘Global South’. The restrictions of underdeveloped financial and real estate markets in these countries have been turned into frontiers in the global urbanization of capital. We propose to study market making practices that shape and reshape the Cuban property market following the regularization of private property in 2011. We focus on: 1) the emerging home ownership and tourism property markets; 2) the transnational flow of investment, especially from Cuban expats in Miami and elsewhere in the US; and 3) how households (small entrepreneurs) use opportunities in the tourism property market. Together these processes are constitutive to Havana’s emerging property market. The practices of local entrepreneurs and the inflow of capital from Cuban expats in Miami into Havana’s (tourism) property market are an entry into understanding Cuba’s socioeconomic transition towards market socialism. As such, our study also responds to the call to develop more multipolar and cosmopolitan modes of urban theory construction in an age of globalized and financialized capitalism. The first PhD candidate will focus on homeownership whereas the second PhD candidate will focus on property tourism.

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Two PhD Candidates: the Making of Havana’s Property Market at KU Leuven