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.