Seeing like an investor: urban development planning, financialisation, and investors’ 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 maximizing 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 and imaginations of planning and regulation are complex and that many firms have realized 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.

KEYWORDS:

• Financialisation
• property development
• urban planning
• investors
• London

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 It is worth noting that central government’s most recent guidelines for viability negotiations have institutionalized this perception of ‘20% return’ as an expected profit from project (see MHCLG, 2018).

2 Under English planning law, the Community Infrastructure Levy and Section 106 agreements are ‘Planning Gain’ agreements that developers negotiate with local planning authorities.