For 30 years planning has been attacked both rhetorically and materially in England as governments have sought to promote economic deregulation over landuse planning. Our paper examines two new moments of planning deregulation. These are the loosening of regulation around short-term letting (STL) in London and the new permitted development rights (PDR), which allow for office to residential conversion without the need for planning permission. Whilst these may be viewed as rather innocuous reforms on the surface, they directly and profoundly illustrate how planners are often trapped between their legal duty to promote public values as dictated by national planning policy and the government's desire to deregulate. We argue that viewing these changes through a value-based approach to economy and regulation illuminates how multiple and complex local values and understandings of value shape planners' strategies and actions and thus vary national policies in practice. In so doing, the paper demonstrates how planners have, at least, the opportunity to develop a critical voice and to advocate for policy interpretations that can help to create better outcomes for local communities.

As the moderately strengthened financial regulation of Basel III comes into effect over the next seven years, this article sets out a cautionary reminder as to why regulation needs to move beyond a focus on the mitigation and distribution of risk. To do so, the article unravels the much-misunderstood experiences of eight Norwegian municipalities whose investments plummeted as the subprime crisis unfolded: investments that had no immediate ties to subprime mortgage lending or mortgage-backed securities. Focusing on the processes, practices, and instruments of financialization, the article puts forward two new analytical concepts-"the fetishization of the knowledge of risk" and "fictitious distance"-to help explain how the crisis spread so quickly and extensively that it threatened not only the municipalities' investments, but the functioning of global finance as a whole. In so doing, it becomes clear that financialization has set a far more risky form of capitalism that is manifest through concrete economic geographies, from towns and cities in the United States to "distant" Norwegian municipalities. In the highly interconnected entanglement of geographies and finance that make up the global financial system, the fetishes and fictions of finance cannot be ignored.

As the debate continues in economic geography regarding the theoretical, methodological, and empirical need to abstract out from the complexity of real-world economic activity versus the need to examine the multiplicity and specificity of actually existing economies, this article revisits an object the ontology of which sits at the heart of such debates, that is, value. For a sub-discipline that has long-battled to be taken seriously as a social "science," the subject of value in economic geographies has become a battle royal between those who are willing to essentialise and those who are not, with many scholars justify their opposing positions on the grounds of theoretical salience and/or methodological rigour. In this article, I position value as the exemplar of these arguments, contrasting Roger Lee's (2006, 2011) relational understanding of value to the essentialising tendencies of Marx and neoclassicism.The paper posits that far from the openness of a relational approach being theoretically "weak," its strength in being able to deal with real-world complexity allows economic geographers to better explore some of societies' most important questions."… [A]s soon as we accept essences we have a closed system: a system that is impervious to the dynamics, diversity, and difference of the changing contexts in which social practices are embedded … In short, they kill the conversation ….[Instead] denying philosophical bedrocks, privileged vocabularies, and essential essences … keep[s] the conversation going" (Barnes, 1989, p. 301).

Urban designers have long sought to plan more secure public spaces by encouraging a sense of territory through the surveillant and the surveyed. Nevertheless, the racial dimension of this territorialisation is insufficiently recognised. Our research tool, which we have trialled in Milan, identifies the influence of design in creating a sense of security in public space and, independently, the influence of race. It provides designers with a tool that could facilitate a more radically just practice that takes ownership of the role of race in perceptions of secure public space and challenges existing conscious and unconscious bias and which in so doing makes design practice more resilient to the rise of populist administrations increasingly engaging in bordering practices that conjoin migration, race and security at a national scale, but which are often enacted at the city scale.

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