The global politics of an urban age: creating 'cities for all' in the age of financialisation

Abstract

Our globalised and increasingly urban world demands an understanding of how ideas about how to build cities travel to become embedded in places. In this context, private actors operating across borders such as investors, real estate developers, international consultants, global construction companies and engineering firms appear as key agents of change in cities. However, real estate developers' interactions with local stakeholders and their role in territorialising global financial strategies have been relatively under-explored in urban studies and global discussions about our 'urban future', especially within discussions on the implementation of the New Urban Agenda (NUA). This paper aims to initiate future research on this topic, providing some preliminary reflections on the role of developers as key transfer agents in the global movement of capital and its anchoring in places through the transformation of the urban built environment. In this way, we hope to offer some clarity on the transnational movement of financial capital to new places and markets, asking how real estate developers contribute to the dissemination of a global capitalist logic across cities, and what challenges this poses to the implementation of the NUA? To do so, the piece brings together insights from policy mobility literature and recent work on the financialisation of urban developments with the aim of critically assessing whether and how some of the key objectives of the NUA can be achieved in a context characterised by heavy involvement by real estate actors in city-making.

Playing the game: A comparison of international actors in real estate development in Modderfontein, Johannesburg and London’s Royal Docks

“…A globalised world requires analysis which engages with the relationship between 'global' and 'local' forces, people and ideas, especially in an urban environment (Robin and Brill, 2018;Robin this issue). Existing research on this in an urban context primarily focuses on the movement of money or policy, and the role of people who bring an idea to their home city.…”

“…Real estate developers have become part of the network of global ideas about urban form, which morphs and alters as it reaches specific locations (Robin and Brill, 2018). Their own network, comprised of developers and consultants (Robin, this issue) has traditionally been addressed in academia through urban planning and development models which highlight the breadth of processes and people involved.…”

TAKING CITY RANKINGS SERIOUSLY : Engaging with Benchmarking Practices in Global Urbanism

“…This line of critique is also tied to issues with data collection and comparability. The lack of data at the metropolitan level is an issue that is often lamented, not only in the benchmarking literature (Stokie, 1999;Grupp and Mogee, 2004;Conger, 2015), but in urban studies more generally (Robin et al, 2018). It is frequently noted in the literature that due to a lack of available data at the city level for certain indicators, the ranking creators often use national-level data instead for all of a nation's cities, despite likely differences in performance (Meijering et al, 2014;Leff and Peterson, 2015).…”

Performing real estate value(s): real estate developers, systems of expertise and the production of space

“…In that context, real estate developers have become key drivers of the production of space (Robin and Brill, 2018). For instance, Goodfellow has shown how speculative real estate projects in Addis Ababa and Kigali have created "landscapes of unused and underused high-end properties in contexts where investment is desperately needed elsewhere" (2017,786).…”