Maria Kaika and Luca Ruggiero, "Class Meets Land: The Embodied History of Land Financialization" (U California Press, 2024)
01:03:07 Share

I can say to my new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, hey, find a keto-friendly restaurant nearby and text it to Beth and Steve. And it does without me lifting a finger. So I can get in more squats anywhere I can. One, two, three. Will that be cash or credit? Credit. Galaxy S25 Ultra, the AI companion that does the heavy lifting so you can do you. Get yours at Samsung.com. Compatible with select apps requires Google Gemini account results may vary based on input check responses for accuracy.

More rewards, more savings. With American Express Business Gold, earn up to $395 back in annual statement credits on eligible purchases at select shipping, food delivery, and retail subscription merchants, including the $155 Walmart Plus monthly membership credit and $240 flexible business credit. Enjoy the benefits of membership with the Amex Business Gold Card. Terms apply. Learn more at americanexpress.com slash business dash gold. Amex Business Gold Card, built for business by American Express.

Welcome to the new Books Network.

Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today because we get to talk about, I think, quite an interesting book titled Class Meets Land, the Embodied History of Land Financialization, published by the University of California Press at the end of 2024, which takes us into, or at least we start, in 19th century class struggles over land and

and how that actually has quite a direct link to where we're at now in 21st century financial capitalism, which is a really interesting transition and connection that I'm quite intrigued for us to discuss. And I'm very pleased to report that we've got

both of the authors of the book today to have that discussion. So on the podcast, we have Dr. Maria Caica and Dr. Luca Ruggiero to tell us about their book. Maria, Luca, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Thank you for having us, Miranda.

Could you please start us off by introducing yourselves and tell us why this book, why write it together? Give us a bit of an origin story of both of you and the book. Luca, maybe you want to start us off? Yes. So, yeah, I...

I am Luca Ruggiero, I'm a professor of economic and political geography and I work at the department of political and social sciences at the University of Catania in Italy. And my research focuses on land financialization, competing visions and politics of the smart city and urban and social conflicts for environmental and climatic justice.

The book is part of a long-term project that started almost 15 years ago. We received funding from the British Academy for a project that was meant to explore the changes in the structure and functions of the urban economic elites and the changes in the production of space. So in particular, the project focused on London and Europe

Milan and on the emergence of a new generation of urban elites, which, unlike their predecessors, lacked place loyalties and was much more footloose. So one of the case studies of the project was the Pirelli-Bicocca area in Milan, which

And a lot of interesting findings came from this study. So from there, we thought it was going to be interesting to dig deeper into the stories of the Pirelli-Bicocca area and of the Pirelli company. And this is the reason why we decided to write a book together.

Lovely. Thank you for that backstory. Maria, would you like to introduce yourself? Yes, thank you. I'm an architect and planner and geographer. I'm the professor in urban, regional and environmental planning at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

And my research is on urban political ecology, citizen crisis, with a particular focus on the embodied practices of financialization. So I worked on financialization of land, housing, water, and now energy, and how this process affects and is affected by everyday livelihoods and practices. And yeah, look, I gave a good narrative of the backstory of the book,

And I can just add that originally we had Milan and London and we were examining new urban elites and their change of relationship to space, to the production of space.

And then because in Milan, we realized something very important that the new urban elites were not new at all. It was the old traditional industrial capital transforming itself at each phase.

And so we started going backwards, researching backwards and backwards and backwards until we ended up with this rich, timeful analysis of how those 19th century class struggles over land became important for 20, 21st century financialization. It was, it was fascinating.

So exciting. Still is. It does sound quite fun to start in one place and then go, what happens if we pull this thread? Oh, wait, now we get this. Now we get this. It was amazing. It was an amazing story of how empirical and conceptual work feed into each other continuously. And if they do, both parts empirical and the conceptual are...

it changed and get new insight and one fits into the other. Yeah. This dialectic was exceptional. Yeah.

I'm so glad you mentioned that early on, because that's such a key combination of things all throughout the book. It's not kind of one chapter that is concept and one chapter that doesn't, you know, it's all very much entwined. But can I ask you each to tell us maybe a little bit more about the choice of focusing in Milan? Because, of course, you know what you're talking about, pulling threads through history, entwining concept in the embodied. One could look for that in all sorts of places.

So can you tell us more why Milan? Yes. Yeah, we focused on Milan and Pirelli Bicocca because we thought they were definitely interesting case studies for our research. And Milan, until 1970s, was a very important industrial center, not only for the Lombardy region, but for the entire population.

And together with Torino and Genova was part of what was called the Italian Industrial Triangle and was also capital of the Italian economic miracle in the 1960s.

So it was very interesting to see and to focus on the shift from an industrial economy to a post-Fordist economy. Because from 1970s onwards, Milan starts to transform into a post-industrial city and then into an international financial hub.

Pirelli, on the other side, was one of the pioneers of 20th century family-run industrial capitalism, but it was quick to adjust to the requirements of the new economy, diversifying its activities to finance and to real estate. So what we argue in the book is that

The transformation of Pirelli-Bicocca was central, central in allowing Pirelli to survive and to relaunch itself in the global financial economy. But at the same time, it was central also or played a very important part in the transformation of Milan from a manufacturing city into a

a service sector hub. Bicocca was in fact one of the first industrial areas in Milan to be redeveloped and restructured after the decision to close down the manufacturing activities there. So yeah, this is the reason why we selected both Milan and Pirelli.

Hmm. That's helpful to understand. As you said, the case study approach lends itself so well to this. Maria, is there anything you wanted to add on this point? Yeah, look, I've explained very well, I think, why we chose Milan. But what I want to add is that Milan is an important and rich case study.

but here it's also used as a heuristic device. We mobilized Milan's case study to develop the concepts and the grounded theory of land financialization as a lived and embodied process. But these concepts, we believe,

can be mobilized to explain the trajectory of other cities across the Western world. So if we were to study Bergamo, Lille, Brussels, London, the story would not have been exactly the same. But I think we believe we would still find that those 19th century class struggles over land, if we did all this time for analysis, we would still find that these 19th

century class targets over land are deeply implicated in 20th century transition to financial capitalism in many other cities. So although the specific case study matters a lot, what also matters in our book is the methods we chose to examine this case study, which led to this grounded theory that we think matters for understanding the trajectory of cities over

other than Milan. And these, I want to, if you allow me, highlight two key points

methodological choices were made. Please. Thank you. The first is the embodied analysis. And what we mean by this is our shift focus away from what we call the usual suspects of financialization. It's a mouthful. So research on financialization often focuses on global bankers, financial elites, international governance, etc.,

Instead, we chose to put the focus and spotlight on the working class and traditional elites, actors that since the 70s have been considered by much of the literature, but also by journalists, politicians, as more powerful.

parochial actors who didn't matter anymore. Well, by focusing on these actors, we proved not only that they mattered, but they were central in producing each phase of transition of capital transformation since industrialization. And the second methodological choice we made, and we believe it's important, is to perform what we call a

timeful research and analysis. We set out to researching a long history of financialization, 150 years to be precise. We wanted not only to take a snapshot of how things are in the present time, but to research also how things have evolved over this much longer period of time.

And this is actually what became a very powerful generator of understandings that we usually, the way today's academic research goes with fast tracks of publications and the next project coming after the next project and you have to publish it, it's something we don't do much anymore.

So we are really thankful to each other and to this process for allowing us to do this time for analysis. And I should just note that we take our cue from a geologist, Marcia Bionerund, for this call for a time for understanding of things around us.

I'm so pleased that you explained those key methods because they really are quite powerful for what's being done in the book with the case study of Milan, but also in making those wider links to other potential investigations that could be done in similar ways. So now that we have this foundation of why Milan and how you're looking at these processes, I

I wonder if we can start to get into this 150 years of process. So the first place I think to start probably is the idea or ideas, plural, of industrial land and how this turns people who would have been sort of conceptualized as peasants into disciplined industrial labors. That's obviously early in the Industrial Revolution process. But can you help us understand how these

different conceptions of land are creating these changes for people as well. Maria, I think if you want to start off on this one. Yeah, sure. Thank you. Yes. So as you already said, in the late 19th century, in the early industrial revolution, feudalism and industrial capitalism coexisted for a while. And many workers were oscillating between the two modes of production. They were moving from rural to urban areas and back.

But it was not an easy task to turn peasants into disciplined industrial labor. Peasant men and women belonged to an anthropological type, let's call it, that had been curved out of centuries of feudal relations of production. They were used to seasonal work on the land, flexible working hours, seasonal work, as I said, chatting and singing while working, intermingling work with family and social life. Now, to

To become industrial labour, they had to ditch all that. They had to detach themselves from land, from real life, and to change the habitus that they had inherited from the old feudal work, and this did not work well at all. The new rhythms and social relationship factors were alienating. They were disrupting their sleeping, eating, socialising, procreating, all of their activities. The separation of work and social life

production from reproduction was also alienating. The new architectural forms of factories were alienating, all this doom and gloom. So the alienation process was embodied, universal and so strong that large numbers of male and female workers were actually fleeing back to the countryside after short stints of work at the factories.

And industrialists were getting desperate, trying to create this urbanized army of laborers that they needed to gear up the industrial capitalism.

Giovanni Battista Pirelli here was pioneering in two ways. So he originally was clever or shrewd enough to employ soldiers discharged from the Italian army, since he thought, and it was true, these young men were already trained in discipline. He didn't need to do much work. But disciplining workers was costing immense fatigue to all the naturalists.

And Pirelli was also among the first in Italy to realize the role that land could play in producing this new anthropological type of disciplined worker that they needed. And here's the logic for this. To create disciplined workers, industrialists needed to create loyal workers. And to make workers loyal to the company, they had to offer workers a sense of place, a sense of belonging.

And this is where industrial land comes in. So what we argue in the book is that the root idea of industrial paternalism was that industrial land and architecture can do the dirty and hard work of disciplining workers. So to this end, to mobilize his land, industrial land, to do the dirty work,

Pirelli bought 220,000 square meters of agricultural land northeast of Milan. The Bicocca was the name of that land in 1906. Of course, he bought this land in order to expand factory production as well. But he hired the best of architects under the mandate to design industrial spaces that would be pleasant for workers, but also didactic about disciplined factory work.

Work management platforms. Ugh. Endless onboarding, IT bottlenecks, admin requests. But what if things were different? Monday.com is different.

No lengthy onboarding. Beautiful reports in minutes. Custom workflows you can build on your own. Easy to use, prompt-free AI. Huh. Turns out you can love a work management platform. Monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use.

Your data is like gold to hackers. They're selling your passwords, bank details, and private messages. McAfee helps stop them. SecureVPN keeps your online activity private. AI-powered text scam detector spots phishing attempts instantly. And with award-winning antivirus, you get top-tier hacker protection. Plus, you'll get up to $2 million in identity theft coverage, all for just $39.99 for your first year. Visit McAfee.com. Cancel any time. Terms apply.

So we have to imagine the big change that happened there. Early factory sites were associated with gloom and dirt and toll and fear and smoke and all that. Pirelli's new plants at Picocca were designed to allow plenty of air and light to circulate. They invoked an intimate scale with distinguished brick and glass details and ornaments. They would provide a sense of familiarity to workers. It was the...

The modernist ideal of design, of space, that was just being born at the time. But this act of turning gloomy industrial sites and land into modern rational spaces is what aestheticized capitalist relations of production. And it aestheticized discipline as part of this new modernist ideal.

And this aestheticization of discipline extended from space to designing the attire and the manners of workers. Blue-collar workers were required to wear clean uniforms and behave politely at all times. But most importantly, next to the newly designed factories, Pirelli added schools, healthcare facilities, gardens, leisure community activities, and later housing for workers. And Pirelli was not alone, right? This was happening across the industrialized world.

So this made industrial land a unified working and living embodied experience, something that resonated with the blurring of work and life under the old feudal world, something more familiar for the peasants turning into industrial workers. So in short, industrial paternalism turned industrial land into spaces that workers could start perceiving as their own.

And the company itself, Pirelli, was symbolically promoting this sense of belonging. The company was referring to workers as the barons in overalls and to their families as the Pirelli dynasties.

And the expectation was that this new imaginary of belonging to industrial lands and spaces would become instrumental for forging this new anthropological type of worker that industrialists demanded, a human being whose body and life was bound and loyal to production spaces, willing to be disciplined enough to continue being part of this new modern solidarity network among

amongst workers, but also solidarity between entrepreneurs and workers. And this did work. Workers indeed started becoming loyal

But I will complete here, maybe we'll have the chance to discuss this further, that this loyalty lay not only with capital or management, their loyalty lay mainly with the socio-spatial arrangements on industrial land, with the spaces that now hosted their reproduction, their community, their unions, their homes and their families.

Yeah, we're definitely going to keep talking about this idea of space and ties to people. But before we move forward, Luca, was there anything you wanted to add to what Mario just told us? Yes, just a very small thing. What we show in the book, and this comes from this idea of transforming peasants into disciplined workers, what we show in the land is that

land has often been considered, like in Marxist traditional theory, as an unproductive asset. What we show in the book is actually that land has always been a very important asset. In particular, it played a key role in producing this new anthropological type of worker. And so,

it did play a role. So it's nothing like an unproductive asset. Since the very beginning of industrialization, land played this very important role as a tool, actually, to transform

peasants into factory workers, basically. This is very helpful to understand that transformation. But how much of this transformation was kind of happening, I suppose, in the ways that the company owners wanted? I mean, are we seeing class conflict in this sort of process?

Maria, do you want to tell us about that? Yes, definitely. The process of turning peasants into industrial labour was violent, difficult, conflictuous, exploitative, and therefore it was deeply intertwined with the process of a new class identity formation. And that was true for both industrialists and workers. Both were forming and gaining their class consciousness.

And this formation of class consciousness for workers under conditions of exploitation was deeply linked with class conflict. And as early as in 1889, we discuss in the book the bloody Milan riots over better pay, working hours and conditions. They ended up with 80 workers dead and 450 injured. So like in, again, like in the rest of the industrialized world,

None of these processes happened without conflict. And it was in the case of Italy, it was after this bloody instance of the Milan riots of 1889 that industrialists started in earnest flirting with the idea of industrial paternalism or provision of welfare.

and began having this imaginary, which was then materialized of turning industrial land into social spaces as a means to pacify the workforce and as a means to make workers loyal. So as we explain in the book, however, this process of making workers loyal, and we need to keep insisting on that,

did not just benefit industrialists, it was instrumental for workers to acquire this spatially ingrained sense of class consciousness. And as Luca mentioned earlier, it was this spatially ingrained sense of class consciousness that enabled workers to mobilize the same land and the same spaces as a means of

kind of launching pads for class struggle in the decades to come.

Ensuring we don't forget the violence of this is key rather than just allowing the idea of, oh, it was all nice and straightforward. You know, that's not at all accurate. Not at all. Yeah. No. Luca, is there anything you'd like to tell us further about these ideas of the formation of class consciousness and the role of land and ideas about land in that? Without class conflict. I think Maria explained it very well. I just want to say that the book shows that

Actually, there has always been resistance by workers to become a simple function of capital. We could also see, Maria mentioned the bloody Milan riots of 1889, but we could also interpret the movement of operaismo at the end of the 1970s,

as a reaction to an attempt by capital to create yet again another anthropological type of worker. So, yeah, the increasing mechanization, for instance, rationalization and technological innovation in the production process of the 1970s

actually wanted to transform specialized professional factory workers into mass workers, what we say in Italian, operaio massa, that had to perform only simple repetitive tasks. So the workers actually, again, reacted to that because they saw that there was a concrete danger in that situation.

increase in rationalization and mechanization and reacted that with the operatism movement. So this is another example of conflict and reaction to this idea of capital and regimenting workers.

That's definitely helpful to have outlined. Continuing our discussion then about the importance of space, Maria, I wonder if you can tell us more about the creation of company towns, obviously not just land owned by the company, but they're building specific things on them. How does this play into this idea you've been telling us about around gaining the loyalties of workers? Yes, so as we just discussed, yes,

on industrial land acquired a multiplicity of roles which were all performative

and which fed into a multiplicity of imaginaries for how things are and how things could be for both industrialists and workers. So as this industrial land was becoming a community space, a site for social life, a site for union meetings and class struggle, these variegated performative functions of land

were generative, not on their own, but they were key for generating a plurality of loyalties and senses of belonging for both labor and capital. And this is another important thing we note in the book. All these things transformed not only labor but capital.

So for capital, the predominant loyalty to profit, of course, which is key and never goes away, but it became intermingled with welfare provision and care for workers. And it became intermingled with the patronage of social and cultural spaces.

Workers, for their part, became loyal, but as we noted earlier, their loyalty was also multifaceted. There was a multiplicity of loyalties, not just to the factory, to production space, but to the spaces that were now hosting homes, communities, unions, etc.,

So the workers acquired this deeply spatially ingrained class consciousness and identity. And it was so strong that their class claims and their spatial claims became very,

completely intermingled. For example, they would demand the construction of new halls in factories dedicated to their union meetings. This demand became as important as the demand for higher wages. The demand for land in the round factories for their personal allotments and gardens, for entertainment, leisure grounds, etc.,

became as important, well, we can't really quantify it, but became important as the demand for reduction of working hours. But most importantly, this multiplicity and the intermingled loyalties that workers acquired never were unranked. They had a clear hierarchy. And this

the top of their hierarchy was their places of reproduction, of unionization, of class struggle. And this clear hierarchy would become very starkly emphasized when

Ironically for capitalists, the spaces that they designed to control and anesthetize the workforce became precisely the breeding grounds for radical forms of class struggle. During the Second World War, Bicocca's land became the hub for anti-fascist resistance. Right after the end of the war, something unique happened there. Workers took over control of the means of production and started managing the factories at Bicocca

as a collective on their own without the owners. And that moment was the most iconic when workers had to face and act upon their opposing loyalties and beliefs. As Benetati notes, anti-capitalist feelings at that moment when they took over the factories, their anti-capitalist feelings still existed, but now they coexisted with a commitment to increasing factory productivity.

So they were putting in more hours. They were working harder because that was... They were... Well, they perceived these were their factories. Factories were now spaces that actually owned and managed collectively, so they thought. And their loyalty shifted from wage demands to...

self-demands for increasing productions, keeping the factories running. And this logically shifted again when the Pirelli family resumed ownership and control of the factories in the 60s and 70s workers. By then, there were around 12,000 at Bicocca. And they turned Bicocca into a stronghold of the operaismo, as Luca mentioned earlier.

And Bicocco became the laboratory for radical forms of class struggle. And it became known as Italy's Stalingrad at the time. So all this multiplicity of loyalties, and it was...

Discovering all that through live interviews and through archival material, it allowed us to develop a much more complex understanding of both the role of land, as Luca said, not just an unproductive asset, but also the process of class formation. And it allowed us to...

put forward an argument that disagrees with much of critical literature, particularly in the 70s, which depicted industrial paternalism and welfare provision at factories as a means to kill class consciousness. That argument in the 70s was so strong that workers working under industrial paternalism were depicted as

traitors, people who could not possibly have class consciousness. We proved this the opposite. It was precisely those people who were supposed to not develop the clear class consciousness who

who were at the forefront of class struggles in the decades that followed. And we show in the book the importance of the imaginaries and material productions of land played in this process, in the formation of class consciousness and the struggles that followed. Hmm.

Get the Angel Reef Special at McDonald's now. Let's break it down. My favorite barbecue sauce, American cheese, crispy bacon, pickles, onions, and a sesame seed bun, of course. And don't forget the fries and a drink.

Sound good? Ba-da-ba-ba-ba. And participating restaurants for a limited time. It's definitely helpful to highlight the way in which the methods you mentioned earlier help with some myth-busting as well as investigation. But this moment of anti-fascist collective work, I suppose, is fascinating. So I wonder, Luca, maybe you can tell us a bit more about this link between the class consciousness and the anti-fascist moment? Yes. So...

Yeah, actually, I think what Maria just said about the multiplicity of loyalties, this multiplicity of loyalties do help us a lot to understand the anti-fascist struggles. During the fascist period, not only Pirelli, but a lot of factories in the north of Italy became strongholds of anti-fascist resistance.

The Factory of the North, in fact, played a very strong role in the Italian resistance against the Nazi fascist occupation. But I think, first of all, we should ask ourselves why workers developed such a strong attitude

anti-fascist attitude. And I think we explain that very well in the book. Workers' condition during fascism worsened considerably. Under the fascist ideology of corporativismo, which denied the existence of class conflict,

there was an authoritarian suppression of workers' rights, like the right to strike, the right to hold meetings, and workers were reduced to a subordinate position.

And this, in turn, helped industries to reduce salaries and to increase the rhythm of production. So the reaction of the workers against fascism should not surprise. And as we said, and also as we said earlier, as Maria explained, it was the material and symbolic appropriation of factory space by the workers that made it possible for Bicocca and other factory towns to become industrialized.

havens for anti-fascist resistance. Why? Because the workers felt the spaces inside and outside the factories as their own spaces and felt they had to protect and defend these spaces from the Nazi fascist occupiers.

occupation. At the same time, their fight was not a micro-local fight characterized by particularism. Workers were not just defending their working and living spaces, but they were conscious of the strategic role that the factories played in the economic development of the country. And they did not want these factories to fall into the hands of the enemy.

But at the same time, workers also pay the price. For instance, Bicocca workers in 1944 during an anti-fascist strike said,

During this strike, 186 Pirelli workers were arrested and of these 186, 171 were sent to concentration camps. So, yeah, this is a very sad story together with the story of the factory as an important stronghold against the Nazi fascist occupation.

Yeah, it's definitely, I can imagine, a key moment for the workers, but obviously also something that the owners probably found quite challenging and came from a place of going, oh, how do we sort of reimpose our capitalist landlord ideas of industrial land that we've been working on for the last few decades? So, Luca, can you tell us what they did to do that? Yeah, absolutely.

They wanted, of course, the owners or they started after this happened after the very strong, violent social conflict of the 1960s and 1970s.

Pirelli responded to these social conflicts with an equally radical class act of land revanchism. This was a plan to shut down all production units at Piconca and disperse the production activity across Italy into smaller flexible units.

So the plan would transform the land into a techno city, a research and technology center on the model of the American technological parks that would help Pirelli also to launch itself into a new phase of high-tech capitalism. And this meant, of course, land becomes crumbling.

Crucial again, this meant reclaiming the land and the social spaces from the military workers, the same land that had been so important for workers for the formation of their class consciousness and land used as a launching pad for the struggle against capital.

And this act of Landrevan schism was successful at least for three reasons. First of all, the workers' movement came out significantly weakened after the 70s period of the Anni di Piombo e Strategia dell'attenzione, which was one of the most troubled periods in modern Italian history, characterized by acts of terrorism, clashes, kidnapping, bombing, etc.

for which workers' activism was also blamed. So this greatly damaged the labor movement and made it easier for capital to perform this act of land repossession and factory closures. Second,

The workers of Bicocca also not only had to face the company in this struggle, but they also had to face the local authorities of Milan, who saw in the TechnoCity project a golden opportunity to reinvent Milan as an international high-tech hub.

And third, the negotiation for the techno city project, which involved the local authorities, this time the trade unions and the company, resulted into a piri victory for the workers. In fact, the trade unions, in order to secure jobs, accosted

accepted to hand back the land, but in so doing they deprived the workers of their most important tool in class struggle. And that is why we associate land revanchism also to what we call the unmaking of the working class, because this is also the moment when land revanchism means also the end of the working class as a strong political subject.

A key point indeed. And in fact, in the book, you discuss the Eureka moment. Can you help us understand more what this was and the factors that went into it? Yeah, I can start with that. This was a very important finding for us. And actually, it's important perhaps to say that this...

this discovering or documenting this Eureka moment, it really propelled us to look backwards more into time. It was a Eureka moment for us too, in a way. So this was...

in the 1980s, where Pirelli had already undergone the first phase of land revanchism, trying to turn Bicocca into a techno city. But none of this was successful. It kept struggling against cutthroat international competition, acquisitions and mergers. And this was true of...

The whole of the Western industrialized world, like most of the things we say about Pirelli, resonate with what was happening in the whole of the Western industrialized world. Many traditional industries were going into bankruptcy at that time.

And at that moment in the late 80s, Pirelli was pursuing a merger. It was a time of mergers and acquisitions, big time. A merger with Dunlop, a UK competitor. And during the negotiations with Dunlop, Giovanni Nassi, who was a CEO of Pirelli, as he told us in the interview, he noticed that Dunlop

in contrast to Pirelli, was calculating their industrial land and their abandoned plants in their balance sheets at market value. While at that time, Pirelli was calculating their industrial land and abandoned plants at zero value or at depreciating value. And that was the Eureka moment, the moment when

So desperate to balance the company's accounts, Pirelli sheds its traditional practice of treating industrial land as an investment that depreciates over time until it ends at zero value. And it brings now for the first time industrial land into the balance sheets according to the rent it would potentially yield in real estate markets on speculative grounds, in effect.

So the Eureka moment was a moment when Pirelli literally turned the potential rent gap into real prices, which appeared in their balance sheets and immediately enhanced the company's accounts. Very concretely, we see in the accounts of 1984, the total value of land and buildings was calculated at 45 billion lire.

In 1985, every year, this was depreciating. In 1985, it was 43 billion lire. But suddenly, in 1991, this value of the same land and buildings jumps to 160 billion lire. And initially...

This was a creative accountancy exercise, if you wish, an exercise in creating speculative values that help balance the sheets of a nailing company. But what is most important is that soon this accountancy exercise became the centerpiece of a radically new corporate strategy, a strategy that launched Pirelli into a new phase of capitalism,

Pirelli became a key player in international real estate. It created the daughter company, Pirelli RE, Pirelli Real Estate. And this really defined the company's relationship to both

the developments in global capitalism, but also to urban space and local governments and local workers and citizens. So soon industrial land was not only imaginatively

imagined as real estate, but it was materially produced as an asset, as a real estate asset. And this happened when Pirelli ditched the TechnoCity project and launched his new plan to turn Bicocca

the industrial land into a historical suburb, a mixed-use space for luxury housing, offices, cultural centers, galleries, cafes, the centerpiece for Milan's new urban economy and the then so trendy new creative class. The Milanese elites and local government and planning authorities were delighted. They really went out of the way to facilitate the process.

And this space is the space we see today and which now also hosts the Milano Bicocca University. But if I may just add that turning industrial land into an urban real estate asset, it was very important. It was the final act of the 150 years of class struggle. The transformation of Bicocca that allowed transformation

traditional industrial elites to morph into protagonists of international real estate and later financialize global capitalism.

could only happen, as Luca already mentioned, by closing down the factories, firing workers, and in effect, as we say in the book, it could only happen by undoing Milan's par excellence working class, iconic and heroic working class,

And it was this undoing of the working class that made space for the new creative class that was supposed to be attracted to this reinvented industrial spaces. And one veteran Pirelli worker put it in the interview, quote,

They decided it was time to end class struggle. They decided it was time to kill the factories. This goes right back to what we were saying at the beginning around kind of ideas of land and what the owners think people should behave like on land.

that land. And also links to what we've been talking throughout about the impact of all of these ideas on space. So, Luca, is there anything you want to add on to what Maria's told us to help understand the impact of land financialization on the ground? Eczema isn't always obvious, but it's real. And so is the relief from Ebbglis. Ebbglis.

After an initial dosing phase of 16 weeks, about 4 in 10 people taking EBCLS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin. And most of those people maintained skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing. EBCLS, labricizumab, LBKZ, a 250 milligram per 2 milliliter injection is a

Prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema. Also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies. Ebglus can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to Ebglus. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems.

You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with Epglys. Before starting Epglys, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Searching for real relief? Ask your doctor about Epglys and visit epglys.lily.com or call 1-800-LILY-RX or 1-800-545-5979.

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the Name Your Price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states.

Oh, yeah. Okay. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, we do take into consideration not only this transformation of land into a financial asset, but also the impact that this financialization created on the land and the community living on the land. So the invention of Pirelli's land as a financial real estate asset, first of all, eradicated this 150 years of

of extremely rich history of class struggle that produced, as we said, these multiple imaginaries and uses of the land. We already spoke of Bicocca as a city of workers, as a showcase of industrial paternalism, as a hub of anti-fascist resistance, but also exceptional case of appropriation of the means of production by the workers after the war.

Italy, Stalingrad and hub of opera is in the 1970s. So, um, uh, all of these, uh, was, was canceled with the transformation of the land into a financial asset. And, uh, from the interviews we conducted, uh, we noticed that all the new residents, but also the new population of the, of university students and academics, um,

shared the opinion that the invention of Bicocca turned the area into a no-man's land.

The old residents reported that they had lost their reference points. They cannot accept the erasure of their historical social spaces and landmarks, those social spaces that had been produced through decades of intense class struggle. One of the old residents, for instance, that we interviewed for the book did recognize the

an aesthetical improvement that came with the transformation of Bicocca into a middle-class district. But at the end of the conversation, he also openly admitted these new services created are not for us. In fact, he had never been to the Archimboldi Theatre or to the contemporary art space of the Anger Bicocca.

At the opposite, the original inhabitants remember Bicocca, also with a dose of nostalgia, as a vibrant and alive place with a constant flow of workers moving around.

During the interviews, the residents of the new apartment blocks, the office workers, the university staff and the students often describe Bicocca, the new Bicocca, as empty and alienating. And this is also because the area is massively...

covered by security guards, surveillance cameras, and this mixed with the grandeur and the monumentality of the architecture, discouraged socialization and also hanging around.

A researcher at the University of Bicocca speaks of the area, for instance, as a space of controlled social activity, as a space in which urban design incorporates the fear of the stranger.

That is very interesting to understand. Thank you, Luca. Maria, is there anything else you want to add in about kind of what the space, the architecture, that sort of thing is like now? Yes, Luca very clearly explained that when Bicocca lost its working class character, it became no man's land. We call that it became a decaffeinated urbanity.

and an urbanity from which the people who created it are taken out, like caffeine is taken out of decaf coffee. But what we also explain in the book is that the choices for architectural and urban design

Etten-Yubikoka also contributed to the production of this decaffeinated urbanity from which the history is taken out, like caffeine is taken out of coffee. So the new monumental designs, and we have some pictures in the book because you need to see this monumentality and how imposing it is.

But this monumental design that recreates the space is a clear rapture from the more intimate spaces of the workers' village. The new designs either replaced, eradicated and replaced, or

literally engulfed the old industrial and social spaces and what remains of the workers housing units are totally segregated from the new luxury office and university buildings and the gallery etc. The

The old cooling tower is a very good example of what happened there. It kind of epitomizes this change. The old cooling tower is a massive, very tall, multi-story construction, concrete construction, a beautiful concrete construction that still dominates the landscape. But now it's placed behind a glittering new facade of glass and steel.

And this transformation of the cooling tower into a glass and steel, sleek auditorium is an eloquent symbol of the strategic role that real estate played in the Cinderella-like transformation of Bicocca from a manufacturing site to international real estate value generator. And the few remaining inhabitants in the old workers' village are

have been desperate to keep some of that history going. So in such a desperate attempt to keep alive at least symbolically some elements of that history, one of the retired workers sent a letter to the City Council of Milan in 2008 pledging for at least renaming the new squares or streets after Pirelli's workers who opposed fascism and died in concentration camps in 1944.

In some ways, that's almost a case study within a case study. It is, yeah, yeah. What a great way, I think, to end our discussion about the book. But before I let you both go, is there anything you're currently working on or looking to work on next, whether or not it's a book that you want to give us a brief sneak preview of? Luca, perhaps if you want to start? Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, my latest research activity focuses on the crisis of social infrastructure with particular reference to community level publicly provided social infrastructures such as hospitals and public gardens and

And yeah, I concentrate in particular on critical evaluation of the impacts of the unmaking and remaking of social infrastructure, in particular in socially deprived districts of cities of the Italian South. But I also have the idea of connecting these themes with the financialization by taking into consideration the increasing process of marketization and financialization of care practices. Yeah.

That sounds intriguing. Maria, what about you? Yeah, I work on labor environmentalism. So the kind of broader aim being, and I'm not alone in doing that, many scholars like Stefania Barca, Mike Huber, Nikki Luke, are looking at environmentalism.

how important it is to conceptualize, but also do empirical work and political work, if you like, to understand why the labor movement and the environmental movement have been severed. And there's plenty of good analysis already, but also how we can bring the two together again, both in our understanding of scholarship and in realpolitik.

And I'm also, that's my broader, if you wish, what conceptually drives my academic work at this moment. More concretely, I work on a number of projects with focus on embodied practices of financialization and one large Horizon EU project, Prefigure, which we now have with seven other international organizations

focuses on the financialization of housing and energy. And we're looking at the housing and energy combined and how the financialization works

of both housing and energy is something that affects households and everyday lives. How these kind of decisions for a green economy and a financialized green economy land on households and start having demands about transitions that many households cannot actually fulfill, creating even further practices of exclusion and

inequalities. So these are the key things I'm working on at the moment.

Hmm. Thank you both for sharing. That all sounds very interesting. So thank you and best of luck for pursuing those projects. Of course, listeners who want to engage in all the sorts of thinking can read the book we've been discussing titled Class Meets Land, The Embodied History of Land Financialization, published by the University of California Press in 2024. Maria, Luca, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Thank you so much, Miranda, for having us. It's been fun.