Dr Aretousa Bloom

Aretousa is an LSE Fellow in Urban Geography at the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is broadly interested in understanding transformations in the nature of contemporary capitalism, with a focus on finance and its intersection with various facets of urban and social life.

Her research and teaching interests are in land and housing financialisation, speculative urbanism, public debt, state power, urban climate politics, climate risk, visual culture, and social theory.

Aretousa holds a PhD in Planning and Public Policy from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, as well as a MSc in Community and Regional Planning from The University of Texas at Austin, and a BA in Architecture from the University of Cambridge. Before joining LSE, she completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship funded by the Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius foundation at Uppsala University, Sweden, and has taught and researched at Queen Mary University of London, and Goldsmiths, University of London.

Expertise

Financialisation; Urban Political Economy; Housing; Climate Politics

Selected publications

• Bloom, A. (2023). Public land, value capture, and the rise of speculative urban governance in post-crisis London. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 56(6), 1771-1786. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X231199701 (Original work published 2024)
• Bloom, A. (2024). Labour, Financialization, and Rent in the Construction Industry: Towards a Hybrid Framework of Accumulation. Housing, Theory and Society, 41(1), 47–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/14036096.2023.2292591
• Bloom, A. (2022). Value ‘stripping’: Affordable housing, institutional investment, and the political economy of municipal debt. European Urban and Regional Studies, 30(1), 66-71. https://doi.org/10.1177/09697764221123929 (Original work published 2023)