Where is the International Research Conference being held?

The International Research Conference is being held in Lima, PER.

What is the currency for any associated fees?

Any associated fees for the conference are denominated in USD.

International Research Conference

Name: International Research Conference
Start: 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z
End: 2026-10-16T00:00:00Z
Location: Lima

Oct 14–16, 2026Lima, PeruIn-person

Registration open

The International Research Conference is an academic gathering held in Lima, PER, focusing on various research topics. This event provides a platform for scholars and researchers to present their work, engage in discussions, and foster collaborations within the global academic community. The conference is designed to facilitate the exchange of ideas and methodologies across different disciplines.

Committees & topics

Topics
Land Commodification, Speculative Dynamics, and the Financialization of Urban Space · Informal, Illegal, and Illicit Investments in Real Estate: Vulnerabilities of Property Financial Systems · Informal, Illegal, and Illicit Urban Development · Gentrification, Urban Speculation, Commodification, and the Financialization of Neighborhoods · Scales of Speculation in Land and Housing: From Plot to Portfolio · The Vulnerability of Property Financial Systems · The Role of Policy, Legal, and Planning Structures in Shaping Urban Development · New Players in Urban Development, Planning, and Legislation

Why it matters

This conference is significant for several reasons. Firstly, its location in PER highlights the growing importance of South America as a hub for academic and research activities, drawing attention to regional perspectives on global issues. Secondly, by bringing together researchers from diverse backgrounds, the conference promotes interdisciplinary dialogue, which is crucial for addressing complex contemporary challenges. Such gatherings are vital for the advancement of knowledge and the development of innovative solutions.

The exchange of research findings at events like this can influence policy-making and practical applications in various fields. It allows for the dissemination of new theories, empirical data, and methodological approaches that might otherwise remain confined to specific academic silos. Furthermore, the networking opportunities provided can lead to new partnerships and research projects, extending the impact of individual studies to a broader, collaborative effort. The conference's focus on international participation underscores the interconnectedness of global research endeavors.

How to prepare

For those preparing to participate, understanding the nuances of international academic discourse is essential. Researchers should consider how their work resonates with a global audience, particularly given the conference's setting in PER. This involves not only presenting robust research but also framing it in a way that is accessible and relevant to scholars from different cultural and academic traditions. Effective communication across diverse backgrounds is key to maximizing engagement and impact.

Prospective attendees should also consider the broader geopolitical and socio-economic contexts that might influence research discussions. For instance, understanding the specific development challenges or research priorities prevalent in South America could provide valuable context for presentations and discussions. Engaging with the work of other participants, both formally during sessions and informally during breaks, can lead to fruitful collaborations and a deeper understanding of varied research perspectives. Preparing for a conference of this nature requires not just academic rigor but also a strategic approach to networking and cross-cultural communication.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 4 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Peru

Host nation and a significant contributor to regional academic discourse.

Role in topic

As the host country, PER provides the geographical and cultural context for the conference, influencing the perspectives and research priorities discussed. Its academic institutions and researchers are likely to play a prominent role in shaping the agenda and contributing to the intellectual exchange.

United States

Major source of academic research and funding.

Role in topic

Researchers from the USA often contribute significantly to international conferences, bringing diverse methodologies and theoretical frameworks. Their participation can enrich discussions and foster transatlantic academic collaborations.

Brazil

Key regional academic player with unique research insights.

Role in topic

BRA, as a prominent country in South America, is expected to have a strong presence, offering regional perspectives and research findings that are particularly relevant to the conference's location and potential themes.

Spain

Historical and linguistic ties with South America, influencing research.

Role in topic

Given historical and linguistic connections, scholars from ESP often engage in research related to South America, potentially contributing insights on cultural, historical, and social dynamics relevant to the conference.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Land Commodification, Speculative Dynamics, and the Financialization of Urban Space

Since the liberalization waves of the 1980s and 1990s, land has been progressively transformed from a use-value resource — for housing, agriculture, or public infrastructure — into a tradable financial asset. The deregulation of mortgage markets in the United States and the United Kingdom, the securitization of real estate debt, and the rise of Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) opened urban land to global capital flows. The 2008 global financial crisis, triggered in large part by the collapse of mortgage-backed securities, exposed the systemic risks of this model but did not reverse it; instead, post-crisis monetary easing channeled even more institutional capital into housing and land as 'safe' yield-bearing assets. Today, sovereign wealth funds, private equity firms (notably Blackstone and Brookfield), pension funds, and insurance companies hold substantial portfolios of residential and commercial real estate across continents. UN-Habitat and the former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing, Leilani Farha, have documented how this financialization decouples housing prices from local incomes and fundamentals, generating speculative bubbles in cities from Toronto and Lisbon to Seoul and Sydney. The core dispute concerns whether housing and land should be treated as human rights anchored in the ICESCR framework, or as legitimate asset classes within liberalized capital markets.

Key players

Informal, Illegal, and Illicit Investments in Real Estate: Vulnerabilities of Property Financial Systems

Real estate has long served as a preferred vehicle for laundering illicit proceeds, owing to high transaction values, opaque ownership structures, and historically weak anti-money laundering (AML) oversight in property markets. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and Transparency International have repeatedly flagged the sector's exposure to corrupt officials, organized crime, and sanctions evaders. Investigations such as the Panama Papers (2016), Pandora Papers (2021), and the U.S. Treasury's Geographic Targeting Orders have demonstrated how shell companies — often registered in Delaware, the British Virgin Islands, or Jersey — anonymously acquire luxury property in London, New York, Vancouver, Dubai, and Singapore. Following Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Western sanctions regimes accelerated reforms: the United Kingdom enacted the Register of Overseas Entities, and the U.S. FinCEN finalized a beneficial ownership reporting rule for residential real estate in 2024. Yet enforcement remains uneven, and jurisdictions such as the UAE have been periodically grey-listed by FATF for AML deficiencies in property markets. The central tension lies between financial transparency obligations, investor privacy norms, and the role of real estate as a politically sensitive store of value for both legitimate and illicit wealth.

Key players

Informal, Illegal, and Illicit Urban Development

Roughly one billion people — about a quarter of the global urban population — live in informal settlements, according to UN-Habitat. Informal urbanization emerged as a structural response to rapid rural-urban migration, exclusionary land markets, and inadequate public housing supply, particularly across Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia from the mid-20th century onward. Beyond settlements built by residents themselves, a parallel phenomenon involves illegal subdivisions, unauthorized high-rise construction, and connivance between developers and local officials to bypass zoning, environmental, or building codes — patterns documented from Istanbul's gecekondu to Delhi's unauthorized colonies and Cairo's informal high-rises. Responses have oscillated between eviction, in-situ upgrading (favored by UN-Habitat's Participatory Slum Upgrading Programme), and legalization through titling, influenced by Hernando de Soto's property-rights arguments. The 2016 New Urban Agenda adopted at Habitat III committed states to inclusive urbanization, but implementation has been inconsistent, and disasters such as the 2023 collapses in Turkey following the Kahramanmaraş earthquakes underscored the lethal consequences of illicit construction. The core debate concerns how to reconcile the legitimate housing needs of informal residents with rule-of-law concerns, environmental risk, and the criminal economies sometimes embedded in unauthorized development.

Key players

Gentrification, Urban Speculation, Commodification, and the Financialization of Neighborhoods

The term 'gentrification', coined by sociologist Ruth Glass in 1960s London, originally described the displacement of working-class residents by middle-class newcomers in renovated inner-city housing. Since the 1990s, the phenomenon has scaled and globalized: tourist-driven gentrification in Barcelona and Lisbon, transit-oriented displacement in U.S. cities, studentification in university towns, and 'short-term rental' pressures driven by platforms such as Airbnb have all reshaped urban housing markets. Neil Smith's 'rent-gap' theory and David Harvey's work on accumulation by dispossession frame gentrification as the predictable outcome of capital seeking under-valorized urban land. More recently, institutional landlords purchasing single-family homes (notably in U.S. Sun Belt cities post-2008), the rise of build-to-rent portfolios, and the listing of residential REITs have brought a new, financialized layer to neighborhood change. Cities including Berlin, Barcelona, New York, and Lisbon have experimented with rent caps, short-term-rental bans, and vacancy taxes; courts have struck down some measures (e.g., Berlin's Mietendeckel in 2021). The dispute centers on balancing investment, urban regeneration, and tax revenue against rising rents, cultural displacement, and the erosion of socially mixed cities.

Key players

Scales of Speculation in Land and Housing: From Plot to Portfolio

Speculation in land and housing operates simultaneously at multiple, interlinked scales. At the micro-scale, individual landlords, small developers, and house-flippers acquire properties anticipating capital gains, often amplified by tax regimes favoring real estate over labor income. At the metropolitan scale, large developers and municipal land banks reshape skylines through master-planned districts, often coordinated with public infrastructure investment. At the macro and global scale, cross-border capital flows — from sovereign wealth funds, REITs, and private equity vehicles — treat housing as a globally arbitrageable asset class, contributing to synchronized price cycles documented by the IMF Global House Price Index. These scales interact: ultra-low interest rates after 2008 and during the COVID-19 pandemic compressed yields globally and pushed institutional capital into 'beds and sheds' (residential and logistics), inflating prices even in mid-sized cities far from financial centers. Mega-projects such as Saudi Arabia's NEOM, Egypt's New Administrative Capital, and Indonesia's Nusantara represent state-led speculation on entirely new urban geographies. The policy challenge is that interventions effective at one scale (e.g., local rent control) may be undermined by dynamics at another (e.g., capital reallocation across jurisdictions).

Key players

The Vulnerability of Property Financial Systems

Property is the world's largest asset class, with global real estate value estimated by Savills at over USD 380 trillion, and mortgage debt forms the largest single category of household liabilities in most developed economies. This makes property finance a systemic concern: the 2007–2008 U.S. subprime crisis, Spain's post-2008 housing bust, Ireland's banking collapse, and China's ongoing developer debt crisis since the 2021 Evergrande default all demonstrate how stress in real estate can rapidly transmit to banks, sovereigns, and the broader economy. The Basel III framework and macroprudential tools such as loan-to-value and debt-service-to-income caps have been deployed by central banks and the Financial Stability Board to mitigate these risks. New vulnerabilities are emerging. Rapid interest-rate rises in 2022–2024 stressed commercial real estate (notably U.S. office markets), exposed leveraged non-bank lenders, and revealed concentration risks in regional banks (e.g., Silicon Valley Bank's commercial real estate peers). Climate-related risks — physical (flood, wildfire, heat) and transition (stranded carbon-intensive buildings) — are increasingly priced into property markets, with insurers withdrawing from high-risk regions in Florida, California, and parts of Australia. The debate concerns how to make property finance resilient without choking off housing supply or credit access.

Key players

The Role of Policy, Legal, and Planning Structures in Shaping Urban Development

Urban form is shaped less by markets alone than by the legal and planning frameworks within which markets operate. Zoning emerged in early-20th-century New York and German cities to separate land uses; postwar master planning, influenced by the Athens Charter and the work of figures such as Le Corbusier and Robert Moses, institutionalized modernist segregation of functions. From the 1970s onward, critiques from Jane Jacobs, the New Urbanism movement, and rights-to-the-city scholarship (Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey) pushed planning toward mixed-use, participatory, and equity-oriented frameworks, partially codified in the 2016 New Urban Agenda. Legal structures — property law, expropriation powers, inclusionary zoning mandates, development charges, and environmental impact assessments — determine who captures land-value uplift from public investment. Recent debates focus on YIMBY ('yes in my backyard') zoning reform in California, New Zealand, and parts of Canada to enable denser housing; land-value capture instruments promoted by the OECD and Lincoln Institute; and the integration of climate adaptation, transit-oriented development, and informal-settlement regularization into planning law. The core question is how legal and planning tools can channel private development toward public goals without producing exclusion, sprawl, or regulatory capture.

Key players

New Players in Urban Development, Planning, and Legislation

For most of the 20th century, urban development was dominated by municipal governments, national housing ministries, traditional developers, and locally rooted banks. That landscape has been reconfigured. Global private equity firms (Blackstone, Brookfield), sovereign wealth funds, and asset managers now operate as direct urban landlords. Technology platforms — Airbnb in short-term rentals, WeWork and its successors in flexible office, Zillow and PropTech analytics firms in pricing — have altered how property is used, valued, and transacted. Philanthropic and impact-investment vehicles, from the Ford Foundation's mission-related investments to Bloomberg Philanthropies' city programs, increasingly shape urban policy agendas. Meanwhile, civil-society actors have professionalized: housing movements (PAH in Spain, Right to the City Alliance in the U.S., Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa) influence legislation, while community land trusts and cooperative housing models offer alternative ownership structures. New state-led developers — China's local government financing vehicles, Saudi Arabia's PIF, Singapore's HDB — operate at unprecedented scale. International standard-setters (UN-Habitat, OECD, FATF, IFRS Foundation) increasingly shape domestic urban legislation through soft law. The central question is how legitimacy, accountability, and democratic oversight can be maintained as the cast of decision-makers in urban development becomes more diverse, transnational, and financialized.

Key players