This book is a timely and urgent study on how the financialization of rental housing by investment firms is reshaping urban climate adaptation with a particular focus on the coastal city of Norfolk, Virginia. This region presents a key example where rising seas and rising rents- two of today’s major socio-economic and environmental challenges- are colliding. Attuning to a social geography of adaptation and finance, its chapters, dispatches from the frontlines of these twinned crises, are developed through the distinct views of individuals who navigate and contest the liquidation of their city by finance and by flood.

From boardrooms to the rubble of public housing, the book details how adaptation plans turn climate risk into bankable assets, how a mobility trap forces renters into flood-prone neighborhoods, and how flood resilience was weaponized to displace Black public housing residents. Liquid Cities charts an ascendant financial sovereignty over urban adapted futures, ultimately offering concrete policy ideas for ensuring that renters are not left behind in this compelling account of capital, water, and one region's fight for its future.

Alexander Fella teaches humanities in the Virginia Community College System and previously taught anthropology at Christopher Newport University. He has worked with UN-Habitat as a consultant housing policy specialist focused on climate change and investor roles in housing markets, and with the Norfolk Department of Public Health as a social epidemiologist examining the links between housing, health, and inequality. In 2022, Fella founded CityWork, which conducts spatial research and builds tools that make urban data accessible to organizations across the public, nonprofit, and private sectors. A former fellow of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society, he holds a master's degree from Yale University. He splits his time between Norfolk, Virginia, and Montréal, Québec.