The burgeoning geographical literature on the financialisation of urban development has focused predominantly on the growing importance within this sphere of financial markets, motives, and institutions. This article starts from the observation that in examining such financialisation, scholars have paid insufficient attention to the details of the financial contexts within which it takes place. Through a consideration of certain high-profile ongoing transformations in the property strategies of English local authorities, the article argues that we need to put urban financialisationin this case, state-led variants thereofin its financial context: it needs to be understood as a response, at least in part, to specific financial conjunctures. After several decades of effective withdrawal, many local authorities have assumed a resurgent role in urban property ownership and development in recent years, and especially since the global financial crisis. This resurgence is apparent, albeit selectively, in regard to both commercial and residential property. On the one hand, local authorities have been rebuilding portfolios of investment (i.e., non-operational) commercial property; on the other hand, they have been building new homes, typically not for social rent, through arms-length housing companies. I argue that understanding these trends requires appreciation of local authorities' particular financial circumstances in the "post-crisis" eratheir operation at the intersection of devolved austerity, reformed housing finance, and unconventional monetary policyand of the constraints and opportunities that these circumstances shape.England, financial crisis, financialisation, housing, local government, urban development
| INTRODUCTIONOver the past decade, geographers and planning scholars have been at the forefront of what during that period has developed into a vast, variegated, and still rapidly expanding literature on financialisation. One strand of that literature within which the work of economic and urban geographers and planners has been especially prominent and influential concerns the financialisation of urban development. In theoretically generative and empirically rich studies of cities in North America and Europe in particular, Rutland (Trans Inst Br Geogr. 2019;44:571-586.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/tran | 571 attention to, and sought to understand and interrogate, the increasing role of financial actors, markets and logics in some or all elements of urban development processes.This article engages with and seeks to make a critical contribution to that geographic literature through a consideration of local government-led financialisation of urban development in England in the period since the global financial crisis of 2007-2008. It focuses on two vectors of such financialisation. One of these involves a sharp increase in levels of local authority ("council") investment in non-operational commercial property such as shopping centres, designed to generate positive financial returns. The other involves councils...