City-REDI Seminar Series: Urban Development Planning, Financialisation, and Reflexive Calculation: Investors and Developers' Perceptions of London as an Investment Space - Professor Mike Raco, UCL

City-REDI is delighted to invite you to our seminar series covering economics, economic geography, regional science, economic development, critical urbanism and urban policymaking. 

On the 29th of January, Professor Mike Raco from University College London will deliver a seminar titled "Urban Development Planning, Financialisation, and Reflexive Calculation: Investors and Developers’ Perceptions of London as an Investment Space".  

Abstract:

There is a growing orthodoxy that since the global financial crisis European policy-makers and planning systems have become more dependent on inward investment and the availability of global finance to fund welfare services and projects. This process of financialisation, it is claimed, is driven by the needs of developers and investors, who are focused on maximising returns and limiting their social and economic liabilities.  Planning agencies and traditional territory-based arrangements are viewed with increasing suspicion, as standing in the way of investment and acting as a brake on much needed house-building and regeneration. However, in this paper, drawing on detailed research with investors and developers in London, we argue that there needs to be a stronger focus in academic and policy writing on the multiple, variegated, and diverse calculations and framings that private sector actors take when making investment decisions. Too often their perspectives are caricatured and/or over-simplified.  We show that perspectives and imaginations of planning and regulation are more complex and that many firms have realised that market success results from becoming more deeply embedded in the local political, social, and regulatory environments in which they are investing. A greater understanding of these multiple forms of calculation, in turn, opens up opportunities for the maintenance and/or implementation of more effective forms of territorially-based soft and hard regulation.  The paper concludes by outlining a broader research agenda for planning and urban studies.

This seminar will take place in the Michael Tippett Room, 3rd Floor, Staff House, University of Birmingham, 29 January 2019, 2 - 3pm.

You can find directions to the venue here.