Speaker: Professor Jennifer Robinson, UCL Department of Geography

This paper brings the case of urban development in London into conversation with a wider, global analysis of the politics of large-scale urban developments. Rather than start from the analysis of globalising processes such as neoliberalisation or financialisation, in which different urban outcomes are treated as “variegations” of wider processes, this paper focusses on territorialisation of the politics of urban development (often relegated to “context”) as a starting point for a wider theorisation. A series of recent developments in London are interpreted through the strong path dependent regulatory context there but are also seen as contributing to comparative reflections on urban politics around the extraction and circulation of land value in what Ludovic Halbert calls “transcalar territorial networks” emergent in large-scale developments. In the London case, significant territorial fragmentation motivates a sharp formulation of state interests and capacity in value extraction and throws into relief the diversity of developer interests. Placed in conversation with analyses from a range of other contexts, the paper signposts a comparative agenda to bring into view new insights on state interests in urban development.