Economic landscapes

This chapter reflects on how an economic geographer would approach, theorize, and understand a landscape. The author draws principally upon economic geographers' engagement with economic sociology to demonstrate that even though landscapes may appear legible only in economic, cultural, or political terms, they can in fact be read as the nexus of all sorts of relations and scales of praxis. Housing, especially owner-occupied housing, embodies complex, politically and ethically charged entanglements between the materiality of housing, the meaning of home, and the mobilization of finance. The chapter explores how the idea of "homeownership" has been mobilized in the United States and enrolled within wider notions of "responsible citizenship" and socially sanctioned consumption norms. The transition from low-risk exclusionary to high-risk inclusionary lending practices transformed not only the market for homeownership, but also the structure of capital markets in general, politicizing the character of calculability.