Economic Geography Network Seminar Series

Venue: CASA Seminar Room 106/107

Dubai diasporas, transnational remittances, and intimate infrastructures of finance in India

Recently, cities across India and the Global South have been constructing ‘world-class’ infrastructures. Scholars have examined the global financial instruments and investment vehicles facilitating this infrastructure boom in Southern cities, which is furthering uneven urban development. But we know little about other more intimate flows of capital that are also supporting Southern urban transformations. In this paper, I examine how remittances from middle- class Indian diasporas in Dubai, UAE become financial instruments to fund luxury real estate projects in Kochi city in Kerala, India. I do this by examining the everyday financial practices of transnational actors, including Kochi-based real estate developers, Dubai-based Indian diasporas and Indian banks and financial institutions. I show that by packaging remittances into standardized debt-based instruments, Indian banks act as financial intermediaries between developers and diasporas to manage risks associated with transnational investments. Thus, Indian banks and financial institutions act as ‘shadow actors’ during the production of unevenly developed urban spaces in India. My work extends literature in economic geography, financial geography, and global urban studies by highlighting how informal sources of capital are financialized and made visible to formal financial circuits, furthering uneven development in Southern cities.

Venue: CASA Seminar Room 106/107

Multimodal Geo-AI for modelling Jakarta as a sinking city

Jakarta, one of the world’s fastest-sinking cities, is facing urgent challenges due to land subsidence and frequent flooding. This talk will discuss the findings from the Sinking City Project (2024-2026), which has explored how GeoAI, using multimodal datasets including geospatial, street-view imagery, and textual data, can be applied to understand and predict future flood risks while strengthening the city's urban resilience. To do this, we have collated multidimensional datasets, including flood, urban morphology, infrastructure, environmental & climate, and socio-economic data, across 2016 to 2024, to construct micro-scale (building-level), meso-scale (hexagon-grid-level), and macro-scale (neighbourhood and city-level) flood models and simulations. We employ a wide range of techniques, including Vision Language Models (VLMs), SHAP-enhanced CNN-LSTM, and policy simulations, to develop a more opaque, multimodal framework that offers transferable insights for resilience planning in vulnerable, sinking megacities. The results highlight that flood risk in Jakarta is not merely a natural and climatic issue, but a complex socio-environmental phenomenon that requires multi-scalar, cross-sectoral approaches and long-term mitigation strategies that integrate readiness for climate change, groundwater regulation, infrastructure investment, and equitable development.

Venue: 1-19 Torrington Place 102 Statistics Lecture Room

Diversion towards sustainability or exclusion? New carbon trading governance and sustainable rice production in Ghana

Emission markets have become a key mechanism in global climate governance. Under Paris Agreements' Article 6, new forms of carbon trading seek to overcome past offsetting scheme failures by embedding stricter standards, Southern agency, and sustainable development mandates. This presentation aims to analyse the changing multi-layered governance of emission trading in relation to their local development outcomes with an illustrative case. Combining literature on Global Value Chains and Production Networks and green new path creation, I analyse Ghana’s pioneering role in Article 6 in sustainable rice production, highlighting underlying issues of governance, power asymmetries, local ownership, and policymaking. Drawing on qualitative data from 2024 and 2025, I show that while Article 6 enhances state agency and opens new pathways for climate finance through private investments, it also risks reinforcing elite capture and local community exclusion. These findings highlight both structural constraints and transformative potential within the emerging governance architecture of carbon markets and therefore unpack variegated sustainability transitions linked to emission trading.

Venue: 1-19 Torrington Place 102 Statistics Lecture Room

Further details to be added in due course

Venue: 1-19 Torrington Place 102 Statistics Lecture Room

Further details to be added in due course