• University of Amsterdam

• Academic

• Construction & Housing,
• Economics & Business

'Mortgaged Lives': the biopolitics of debt and homeownership in Spain

The article aims to expand the theoretical framework within which we examine mortgage debt, by focusing on the role that mortgages play not only in financialising housing, but also in promoting a biopolitics of financialising life itself. Conceptualising mortgages as a 'technology of power over life' (Foucault 2003, 246), we expose the biopolitics linked to mortgaged homeownership in order to broaden the scope of analysis on the dialectics between the production of biological futures and the production of future profits. Our analysis is grounded in a historical geographical examination of the biopolitics of mortgage debt in Spain, where, during the most recent real estate boom (1997-2007) mortgages were employed as a technique that was supposed to optimise income by enrolling livelihoods into the cycle of real estate speculation. But as 800,000 mortgages per year were issued at the same period that average wages fell by 10 per cent, mortgages also became a punitive/disciplinary technique, which made the population itself the object of financial speculation. Whilst livelihoods became closely connected to the rent extraction mechanisms of global finance, their very existence followed the fluctuation of financial markets with disastrous effects, including the eviction of over 200,000 Spanish families from their mortgaged homes between 2008-2013. This way, we argue, mortgaged homeownership became central in enrolling biological life into the process of rent extraction, in two distinct ways. First, by making hundreds of thousands of livelihoods ˜'mortgaged', that is, directly dependent on the success or failure of capital accumulation strategies rooted in the built environment. Second, by producing hundreds of thousands of indebted subjects who have to be embedded continuously in the production process in order to meet their debt obligations, and who often remain indebted even after they are evicted from the home they used to own.