Financialization and transnational gentrification: roots of an urban transformation process in Cuenca, Ecuador

The financialization of housing is central to understanding urban development and the processes of transnational gentrification occurring in the Global South. The city of Cuenca offers an emble-matic case, in which transnational investment has induced new processes of urbanization, much of it intended to attract higher-income consumers from the Global North. The transformation of its real estate market from a local one into a transnational one is led partly by Ecuadorian mi-gration to the Global North, but it is also accompanied by North-South lifestyle migration. Both groups have helped to propel real estate construction, especially of new, dense, high-rise condos. The article argues that Ecuador's attempt to boost its construction sector and expand mortgage credit through securitization of debts has helped to attract transnational pools of migrant wor-kers' savings to the built environment of its cities-notably Cuenca. Yet the benefits of urban housing investment are not shared by lower-income workers there, who continue to lack access to affordable housing.