ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a conceptual argument about how financialization is spatially articulated on various geographical scales, producing socio-spatial polarization. It supports this argument through the case of the Hungarian housing market discussing the articulation of the dependent financialization of housing first on a European, then on a national and finally on a local scale. The chapter analyses predominantly on literature that understands financialization as a new regime of accumulation, understanding it as a systemic transformation of global capitalism. It gives a brief overview of both the conceptual and empirical basis for the methodological frame of financialization. The mechanisms of dependent financialization of the housing markets contributed to the social polarization processes within CEE peripheral economies and societies as well. Thus, peripheral spaces developed as scenes of accumulation through dispossession and, as a consequence, gave rise to various dependencies linking local societies to global capital flows and national market processes.
