Speaker
Description
While there is a growing body of scholarship elucidating the nexus between financialisation, urban governance and planning (Savini and Aalbers, 2016; Waldron, 2019), the ways the local state (and planning systems) shape the necessary legal, regulatory, and policy frameworks that enable financialisation in practice remain largely overlooked (Christophers 2015). Moreover, little attention has been paid to formal legislative changes in planning as a key site of influence. Using the case of Ireland which has recently approved a major new piece of planning legislation in the form of the Planning and Development Act 2024, this paper seeks to chart how the ‘real-estate financial complex’ (Aalbers, 2012) is successfully deploying the planning system as a tool for creating real estate assets. Specifically, the paper seeks to show how formal legislative changes in planning are being carefully choreographed through policy narratives dominated by financial sector logic to help alleviate investment risks and enhance the viability of real estate development. In doing so, it documents the emergence of new barriers that restrict democratic engagement and undermine the principles of subsidiarity in the planning process. The paper seeks to contribute to the literature that explores the ‘operational infrastructures’ of financialisation (Christophers, 2015). In particular, it attempts to redress the emphasis in financialisation research on macro-economic forces and path dependencies that enable financial expansion by looking more closely at the often-underestimated roles of elected officials, bureaucrats, and industry lobbyists in shaping the necessary institutional, policy and legal frameworks (Ward & Swyngedouw, 2018) that shape flows of financial capital into local real estate (Weber, 2019).
References
Aalbers, M. (Ed.) (2012). Subprime cities: the political economy of mortgage markets. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Christophers, B. (2015). The limits to financialization. Dialogues in Human Geography, 5, 183-200.
Savini, F. & Aalbers, M. (2016). The de-contextualisation of land use planning through financialisation: Urban redevelopment in Milan. European Urban and Regional Studies, 23, 878-894.
Waldron, R. (2019). Financialization, urban governance and the planning system: Utilizing ‘Development Viability’ as a policy narrative for the liberalization of Ireland’s Post-Crash Planning System. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 43(4), 685-704.
Ward, C. & Swyngedouw, E. (2018). Neoliberalisation from the ground up: Insurgent capital, regional struggle, and the assetisation of land. Antipode, 50(4), 1077-1097.
Weber, R. (2019). From boom to bubble: How finance built the new Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
| Keywords | Financialisation; planning; legislative change; Ireland |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
