Contribution short abstract

We discuss how communities contest land speculation and tourism financialization that transform neighborhoods into corporate assets. Drawing on Wright’s framework and speculative fiction, we trace resident resistance to displacement, financialization, and the erasure of vernacular practices.

Contribution long abstract

Our contribution interrogates the speculative logic structuring contemporary tourism geographies at the intersection of land speculation and dispossession in the so-called post-capitalist moment. Building on Erik Olin Wright’s framework of capitalist power relations and emancipatory alternatives, alongside critical engagements with speculative fiction as a method for imagining post-capitalist futures, it examines how land becomes a financial asset through enclosures for hotels, guesthouses, and short-term rentals. Speculative capital enlists mobility, culture, and amenities to transform community dwellings into investment vessels and neighborhoods into corporate portfolios. As land values detach from social and communal resources, tourist flows, rather than communal land stewardship, drive new sociocultural values. These processes erode affordability, trigger outmigration, and deepen housing precarity, with residents increasingly replaced by temporary, highly skilled remote workers untethered to place. As accumulation by dispossession unfolds through financialization schemes, it overwrites vernacular practices and everyday ecologies, replacing them with curated experiences and branded place narratives.

Through case studies in touristified Southern Mexico and Hawai'i, our contribution traces contestations to how finance capital speculations extract value, displace residents, and reconfigure socio-ecological land relations. In these spaces, capitalist accumulation is an ongoing process that encloses not only land but also environments, culture, and livelihoods, reconfiguring everyday geographies into staged travel experiences. And yet, neighbors are contesting these uneven growth futures by building community archives of practice that document collective resistance, preserve vernacular knowledge, and envision alternative possibilities for land stewardship and belonging.