‘Profiting from failure?’: Investor narratives and imaginations of London’s changing property markets Seminar

Event details

This presentation will report on the first stages of an on-going research project on the financialisation of London’s property and investment markets and the impacts of recent trends and projects on the planning and development of the city’s built environments. London has been faced with growing development pressures over recent decades as its economy and population have expanded. The built environment has become a highly attractive location for inward investment in residential and commercial property, urban infrastructure and a range of productive enterprises. These developments have occurred alongside the transformation of the city’s governance systems including wider processes of privatisation and deregulation/re-regulation and fiscal innovations. They have also been accompanied by new or increased patterns of socio-spatial segregation. And yet the governance relationships that underpin these processes remain relatively little understood. A growing body of literature on the financialisation of urban environments has emerged but much of this is relatively abstract. This paper contributes to this literature by exploring the ways in which global investors imagine and construct narratives about global cities, such as London. It will assess the types of imagined investment landscapes that are being mobilised and deployed in the city and the work that these mobilisations play in justifying investment practices and policy arrangements. The paper will reflect on the implications of investments for the production and management of the urban built environment and the types of global-local relationships that are now emerging.