Coordination, Cooperation and Planning to regulate the financialization of the city

Cities face high concentration of real estate investments without direct relation to the social demand. This speculative urban production is efficient for private finance but costly for public investment. The flow of private funding is fuelled by the high value of land and real estate, fostered by local authorities and governments pushing for higher property values as basis for higher fiscal income needed to invest in utilities and public services. Low interest rates trigger real estate production that serve also as guarantees for taking out loans for other speculative investments.

The significant increase of land and real estate prices is disconnected to the population's revenue and the gap has a strong impact on the social, economic and spatial organization of cities: empty city centres becoming less accessible to citizens, ghost new towns despite housing crisis… Difficulties to identify the origin of most of these massive investments make them suspicious, possibly coming from underground economy. Cities with low regulation are more impacted than those with higher tax and strong urban development regulation.

Questions raised in this Networking event will be:

What are the effects of the financialization of the economy on urban development?

How to mitigate the negative urban externalities of financialization?

How to limit the risk for investors of real estate bubbles generated by financialization?

How local authorities could control financialization to foster their public policies? What capacities to face and drive the urban development in developing countries?

How far urban planning and urban development control and land management can regulate the urban development in the present context of high investments?

What are the roles of networks (of cities, practitioners, regional network etc.) in addressing these issues?