The housing of settlers: Jessica Parish, Dawn Hoogeveen, ‘Gold is not a metaphor*: locating financialisation and housing injustice in settler colonial property regimes in Canada’, International Journal of Housing Policy, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

The housing of settlers: Jessica Parish, Dawn Hoogeveen, ‘Gold is not a metaphor*: locating financialisation and housing injustice in settler colonial property regimes in Canada’, International Journal of Housing Policy, 2025

14Jun25

Abstract: Settler colonial urbanisms and financialisation are two well cultivated areas of thought; however, both have been underutilised to explain the state of housing precarity in contemporary Canada. To address this gap this paper reframes financialisation and assetization through the lens of the settler colonial city and its racialised labour and property regimes. Through analysis of current literature and data on specific practices and outcomes of financialisation and assetization in major Canadian cities, we show how extractive techniques reproduce colonial, gendered, and racialised inequalities and precarities in the housing system. Our intervention demonstrates how settler colonial urbanism and processes of financialisation extend and transform longstanding colonial processes in relation to property, unhoming, and land. We draw on research into homelessness, rental, and owner-occupied housing to expose extraction and precarity as broad structural features of the settler colonial housing system. Ultimately, we argue that financialisation on its own does not explain the multifaceted nature of contemporary housing crisis in Canada. The extractive nature of housing financialisation is situated within an analysis of the specifically settler colonial nature of property and labour in Canadian urbanism.

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