In highly internationalised cities, real estate developers must learn to negotiate global-local tensions to territoralise their work and secure planning permission. This paper examines how they do this and positions itself at the meeting point of research on policy mobility and real estate. Developers have been shown to be co-coordinators of development processes, and one of many agents who facilitate the global flow and production of urban spaces and ideas. In these endeavours local knowledge is important yet developers remain interested in sites beyond their home city. This paper questions what strategies developers utilise to become co-ordinating forces in new cities, a pertinent issue because increasingly urban actors position themselves as 'global' or beyond a geographically circumscribed space.Based on 60 interviews across London's Royal Docks and Johannesburg's Modderfontein, this paper argues that to work in a new location, developers and their consultants must utilise local knowledge, highlighting three specific strategies: (1) on-boarding local political actors; (2) hiring individuals who primarily work in the city and (3) becoming part of 'the club'. These illustrate the ways developers localise themselves, 'learning to play the game', and evidence the consequences for where and how urban politics happens. Ultimately, this paper argues that at the heart of internationalised urban environments there are transnational networks which are becoming sites of urban politics where assemblages of actors are formed that make the global movement of urban ideas possible.

This paper analyses ‘Build to Rent’ (BTR), a new form of tenure in London’s housing market. We examine the ways in which private and public sector actors have shaped the context of BTR’s emergence, and developed a model for delivery in London. We argue they relied on and constructed narratives of negativity about the private rental sector, which were juxtaposed with their product to position BTR as a solution to part of London’s housing crisis. Building on this, and leveraging an emerging but supportive institutional context, real estate professionals have adapted a US model to the UK. We argue that both the narrative-generating activities and the model development reveal tensions, which help theorise the ways new models of financing housing emerge.

The (proposed) development of private sector-led, large-scale urban projects on the periphery of many African cities has drawn increased attention to the geographical breadth and potential consequences of the phenomena in recent years. This work demonstrates the speculative nature of many of these projects and their 'world-class city' aspirations, but also how such plans will exacerbate existing problems, including spatial inequality and environmental degradation. This paper, drawing on 50 interviews and extensive fieldwork, examines one such project in northeast Johannesburg, the Modderfontein New City. The paper responds to existing research and their calls for more grounded studies, and argues that given their distinct logics and developmental mechanisms, large-scale masterplanned edge cities can only truly be understood within the context of their place-specific urban landscapes, and that contrary to the prevailing arguments on this type of project, they do not always exist outside of ordinary governance structures. Supporting the (speculative) conclusions in earlier research, we demonstrate how the plans and early building looked to worsen spatial inequality and environmental problems. However, in highlighting how Modderfontein's failure is partly the product of a strong local state unwilling to compromise on their own agenda in the face of elite-driven edge city developments, we argue such large scale projects in Johannesburg face hitherto under-researched disciplining processes that can disrupt or even derail projects.

‘Patient capital’ is presented by many policymakers as a panacea to address domestic (and sometimes city-level) gaps in financing urban development, particularly housing, that emerged in the post-2008 credit crunch. In this article, we analyse the complexities of patient investors’ entry into residential markets in London and their response to the first major, and unexpected, crisis of demand: the COVID-19 pandemic and immediate falls in market demand. We focus on how patient capital and the firms invested in the professionalised rental market, build to rent (BTR), have responded. We highlight three main responses: (1) advancing their lobbying efforts to secure a more supportive political environment; (2) protecting their income streams by offering new payment plans and adaptability to prevent void rates; (3) turning to a ‘reserve army’ of renters backed by the state – so-called Key Workers (KWs). We argue these demonstrate a continual and co-evolutionary dimension to policy promoting patient capital and the need for patient planning to govern patient investment in housing systems. Our findings are in ‘real-time’ and highlight the importance of structural uncertainties and the breakdown of long-term assumptions in shaping investment decisions.

Recent work on financialisation in urban political economy and economic geography has highlighted real estate developers as a point of analysis for understanding urban governance and ongoing urban restructuring. This paper argues the relational strategies of developers revealed in this work is informed by the existence of a series of risks which they have to mitigate throughout a project's lifecycle. As a result, there is a need for more geographically sensitive-and relational-understanding of real estate risk, and how it influences actors' strategies in places. Building on two examples from Johannesburg and London, this paper explores the relationship between risk, real estate and urban transformation. In highlighting the different roles developers assume: as knowledge coalition builders, political actors and community builders we demonstrate how developers employee specific relational strategies to counter threats to the implementation of their projects.

We respond to the special issue’s call for a multiscalar, historicised approach to state capitalism through an exploration of Sovereign Wealth Fund investment into London real estate. We point to how the UK’s ostensibly market-led recovery since the 2008 financial crisis has relied in part on attracting ‘patient’ state capitalist investments. In this, we contextualise the relational regulation of real estate markets as the outcome of intersecting state projects by considering the investment motivations of the single largest owner of London real estate, the Qatari Investment Authority, and the utilisation of their investment by UK governance actors. Focusing on Qatari Investment Authority’s involvement in London’s Olympic Village, we highlight how this strategic coupling in the real estate market realised domestic and geopolitical aims for the Qataris while facilitating the UK government's strategy to ameliorate London’s housing shortage by fostering a ‘build to rent’ asset class. In doing so, we contribute to readings of state capitalism as an ‘uneven and combined’ process beyond the traditional state/market binary by placing sovereign wealth fund investment into the context of city governance, the geopolitics of real estate and resultant relational forms of regulation.

This paper contributes to existing research on the relational work of real estate developers to demonstrate how internal corporate complexities create opaqueness in governance settings and limit potential community engagement. This work is particularly pertinent at a time when there is renewed interest in the private sector, yet very little analysis that begins from the perspective of the developer. Drawing on the example of London’s Silvertown, this paper shows how the strategies of development organizations evident in existing research, including their work with the public sector, communities and experts, require multiple levels of internal coordination. I argue that because of these sub-centres of power, developers are able to maintain a more deeply entrenched centrality in urban governance.

This paper addresses methodological approaches to comparative urban geography and the consequences of such approaches. It demonstrates three ways by which an imaginative comparison can be constructed and employed: letting the sites speak to one another, repeated instance analysis, and tracing. Successfully employing these methods requires adopting comparison as both an implicit ethos and explicit approach during data collection and analysis, answering “why is it different here?” Reflecting on the impact of utilising comparative approaches, I argue that comparative urbanism helps balance the unique and ubiquitous conclusions from research, and forces researchers to question the norms or assumptions they hold from doing singular case study research, which in turn foregrounds the situational nature of urban governance in analysis. In the specifics of this paper, it also helps uncover assumptions around the power of state and reveals (some) global elite urban networks.