Speculative Urban Statecraft
In an era of financialized urbanism, city governments and global capital reshape space, fuelling displacement, resistance and contested visions of urban futures.
This research priority area explores the contested processes, practices and politics through which city governments are transforming urban space at a time of austerity urbanism, financialization and rentierism. With city budgets under extreme stress, the speculative extraction of rising urban land values, driven by global capital investment in real estate assets, has become a central objective of urban statecraft across varied contexts. This produces novel entanglements and contradictory alignments between state and capital actors, interests and logic, with important consequences for the equitable and sustainable provisioning of collective urban services. These include the racialised displacement of diverse working-class communities; the disruption of social relations and livelihoods; the spoiling of social infrastructures; and the wasting of functional built environments. In response, urban inhabitants disrupt the speculative city and enact their right to the city in ways that prefigure more socially and ecologically just urban futures.
Learn more
- Publication: Disrupting the Speculative City (UCL Press) by Amy Horton and Joe Penny
- Report: 'The Promise of Cross-Subsidy' by Joe Penny with the Public Interest Law Centre
- Commentary: 'Race, Resistance and the Speculative City' in Finance & Space by Joe Penny and Amy Horton
Academic lead
Dr Joe Penny is Associate Professor in Global Urbanism at the UCL Urban Laboratory. His research sits between urban political economy, critical urban planning studies, and economic and social geography. More specifically, his work contributes to three scholarly, policy, and political issues:
- Speculative urban governance and statecraft under crisis conditions,
- The financialization of public land, housing, and social infrastructures,
Municipalist, grassroots and everyday urban politics and democracy.