London, by developers?

Prof Jenny Robinson and Dr Katia Attuyer will present their new research paper: ‘London, by Developers? Political implications of the diversity and negotiated agency of property developers’. Investors from many different parts of the world find in London a safe haven for their money, and the potential to expand value for financial capital. Through a detailed analysis of a large-scale development in north-west London, this paper presents evidence of a diverse array of developers including opportunistic local property owners, global-but-embedded developers, newly arriving international actors, and sources of finance which track back to local social housing assets, diverse land holdings and business profits as well as the more widely discussed financialised investors.

Developer interests are defined in close articulation with these starting conditions of land and finance, with the professional teams and partners they assemble around them, and through the embedded regulatory pathways (notably planning gain practices) which intersect with widely accepted calculations about the costs of and anticipated profits from development.

Developer agency is therefore shown to be produced as distinctive (transcalar) territorialised formations of finance, design, regulation and practice. In London, specifically, the process of securing a development opportunity entails intense (and often quite secretive) negotiations with planners over design (in reference to national and local policy) and the distribution of profits between private and public interests (as planning gain). Highlighting this negotiated form of “developer” agency signals a relatively obscured site of urban politics in London. The paper reflects on the potential for expanding democratic voice in these hidden locations of urban politics.

This is a Hybrid Event

Speaker Details

Professor Jennifer Robinson is Professor of Human Geography at UCL, whose work has contributed to postcolonial critiques of urban studies, with her book, Ordinary Cities (Routledge), published in 2006 and her subsequent Comparative Urbanism: Tactics for global urban studies (Wiley-Blackwell) offering a reformulation of comparativism for urban studies, to take forward this agenda. Her early education was in Durban, where she studied at the University of Natal (now Kwazulu-Natal), Durban. after which she did her PhD at St. John's College, Cambridge University. Before coming to University College, London as Professor of Human Geography, she worked at The Open University (1998-2009), the London School of Economics and Political Science (1996-1998) and at the University of Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal), Durban, South Africa (1990-1996). She was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2024, Member of the Academia Europaea in 2021, and in 2016 was elected Fellow of the Society of South African Geographers.

Dr Katia Attuyer is Assistant Professor in Urban Planning at the University of Birmingham. Her research advances debates in urban geography with a focus on community engagement with the redevelopment of their neighbourhood, neoliberalisation of urban development policies in different geographical contexts , and financialisation. Her second area of expertise lies in well-being and the urban environment, with a particular emphasis on how the social and physical environment of different areas may affect well-being in later life.

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