Selling the Fringe: Financializing Strategies and the Collapse of Local Horticulture at the edge of Auckland, New Zealand

This thesis draws from ethnographic fieldwork in Kumeu-Huapai, at the northwest of Auckland’s rapidly expanding urban periphery as well as existing research on urbanization in California, USA, and Victoria, Australia to examine how the profit-making strategies of property developers and landowners drastically reshapes work and life at the edge of cities. Some two-thirds of the world’s croplands are adjacent to urban centres, and the accelerating pace of urban sprawl across the planet places unprecedented pressure on the existence of these vital food bowl regions. To understand this conflict, I bring together Bourdieu’s analysis of the agents of the peri-urban housing market, Gudeman’s model of the financializing economy, and Harvey’s historical perspective on neoliberalism as the global restoration of financial power. With this theoretical context in mind, I argue that the supposedly intractable conflict between mitigating sprawl and providing housing for a growing urban population is extremely beneficial for financially-motivated parties specifically because of the ways it negatively affects the lives of others. To demonstrate this, I utilize analyses of land use policy, historical records, and physical patterns of development alongside participant observation of local events and interviews with government officials, property developers, landowners and local residents. I then point to alternative approaches to managing peri-urban development that already exist, offering solutions to the manifold social and ecological crises driven by urban sprawl. As real estate becomes the investment asset of last resort in an unstable global economy and climate change begins to materially affect the possibilities of life, the new suburban frontier is now one of our most immediate and important battlegrounds in confronting deepening inequality and adapting to a less predictable biosphere.

Name thesis:degree_name

PhD

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Anthropology

Grantor dc:publisher

ResearchSpace@Auckland

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Richardson, Benjamin Felix

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Busse, Mark
• Sharp, Emma

Statement dc:rights

• Items in ResearchSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/docs/uoa-docs/rights.htm

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/2292/68461

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:researchspace.auckland.ac.nz:2292/68461