Manoel Carlos Pereira Neto

As housing prices outpace incomes and barriers to homeownership intensify, growing numbers of people are turning to renting. At the same time, the infrastructures that organize rental housing are rapidly changing. This dissertation investigates how a new generation of platform firms merges digital and financial logics to capture rental housing and consolidate control over housing stock. In doing so, these firms decouple housing from its social function as shelter and reconfigure it as a flexible, transurban service optimized for profit extraction. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and a relational comparison of Barcelona and Mexico City, the project bridges debates on housing financialization, platform capitalism, and urban governance to show how platform firms are redefining housing access and intensifying speculative circuits of transnational capital that undermine affordability.