Geographies of property(zation) infrastructure: exploring the re-making of residential property and mortgage markets with blockchain

This thesis is an exploratory investigation into blockchain developments within housing and mortgage finance, with a focus on Sweden – the first country in the world where a public-private consortium pioneered a blockchain application to reduce the cost and time of the entire property conveyancing process from months to hours. The study pursues two interconnected goals. First, it examines the scope, direction, and socio-economic impact of this ongoing technological transformation in this mature real estate market, moving beyond assumptions to demonstration of the impact. Second, it investigates the role of Land Administration Systems (LAS) – the object of blockchain upgrades – in shaping and reproducing specific market arrangements and how changes in the processes it supports reproduce [uneven] social relations. To achieve these goals, it brings together several diverse fields – land administration and blockchain, critical social studies, and geographies of marketization – and develops an innovative mixed-methods research design that resembles an empirical forensic investigation. I begin this investigation by stepping back to consider the immediate object of these technological upgrades: the sociotechnical information infrastructure underpinning conveyancing, known among land administration scholars and professionals as Land Administration Systems (LAS). Additionally, I explore the historical and geographic specificities of the context in which this state-led experiment takes place. This approach helps illuminate the underlying complexities of the Swedish property market and housing finance, allowing for a better understanding of how the extent and trajectory of these developments were shaped by multiple contingent events, competing logics, resistance, and power struggles over the governance of LAS.
More specifically, the study reveals that the use of blockchain technology in conveyancing could not only reshape LAS architecture and alter the nature of real estate assets – making them inherently liquid – but also give rise to novel financial products, such as mortgages with transparent audit trails. However, the circulation of such products would introduce substantial risks, including uncontrollable housing price dynamics. In a highly leveraged housing market, these risks would be distributed unevenly, with owner-occupiers and the state being the most affected in the event of a market collapse. In the Swedish case, I argue, this pattern of risk distribution was a primary factor leading to the re-intermediation of the existing system rather than its disintermediation – contrary to the expectations of many blockchain enthusiasts. AS such, the outcome of the Swedish blockchain experiment mirrors the dynamics inherent to a phenomenon to which Paul Langley refers as platform capitalism: dynamics to what described by Paul Langley as platform capitalism – a mode of intermediation and capitalization in the digital economy that, rather than disrupting, strengthens the interdependent neoliberal relationship between finance and broader economic practices, extending financialization into new economic sectors. This case study is used to deepen our understanding of how these dynamics occur. Drawing on empirical findings, this research illuminates the mechanisms through which radical digital technologies and the new coordination methods they introduce reinforce and expand—rather than disrupt—neoliberal relations between finance and housing practices, thereby exacerbating the financialization of housing. Using the framework developed by economic geographers who adapted Michel Callon’s social studies of economization, known as the geographies of marketization program, I critically reengage with the role of LAS in reproducing uneven social relations. I argue that LAS is, in fact, part of a broader "propertyization" infrastructure that actively links local housing markets to global finance, shapes property markets, and advances financialization mechanisms inherent to owner-occupied homeownership. The complexity of these century-old arrangements has been made more visible by blockchain’s disruption of the processes LAS supports.
I contend that this infrastructure should be considered as a locus of agency that plays a crucial role in normalizing perceptions of what property is and should be, thereby spreading specific neoliberal capitalist relations worldwide. Upgrades to this infrastructure through radical digital technologies are poised to exacerbate the effects of such relations, and one of their most salient material manifestations - the financialization of homes.