Lecture One: Money and Morale: Finance and the Politics of Hope in Climate-Changing Cities

Dr Savannah Cox, School of Geography and Planning 

Cities sink or swim as the climate changes not only because of how they respond to floods, fires, and other hazards, but because of how those events—and the futures they portend—are interpreted. Hope, and more specifically its cultivation and distribution within cities, is therefore central to how places sustain the will to act and endure as climate threats intensify. The core claim of this lecture is that everyday financial relations play an increasingly important role in how, and indeed whether, climate-changing cities and those who live in them become or remain hopeful about the future. Through fieldwork in Miami, Florida, and Paradise, California, the lecture examines how municipal bonds, property markets, and insurance participate in the cultivation, circulation, and sometimes diminishment of hope in the anticipation or aftermath of disaster, and how this participation helps drive urban climate pathways. It concludes with the following provocation: to better understand how urban climate futures are made, we must direct our attention to the everyday financial relations that help make climate-oriented interventions such as adaptation and resilience feel worthwhile, necessary, or futile.

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This lecture is part of the Sheffield Urbanism Lecture series - an initiative of the Urban Institute to stimulate dialogue, discussion and understanding of processes of urbanisation and urban life. It is intended as a space to reimagine both the conceptualisations and narratives of urban studies. The 2026 lecture series will build from the expertise, debates and research activities around Finance Urbanism with agenda setting talks from leading thinkers from across the Faculty of Social Science.

Finance Urbanism In the Age of Crisis

Urbanisation, built environments and infrastructures are entwined with the circulation and flows of finance that operate at accelerating speed across our towns and cities. Local governments and communities struggle against austerity and ‘growth-based’ ideologies amid the integration of accumulation regimes across every aspect of city-life. Climate change imperatives and new riskscapes prompt attempts to piece together financial tools and mechanisms to adapt and survive growing ecological breakdown and extreme weather events. Meanwhile, the super-rich build fortressed enclaves to insulate themselves in luxury, influence democratic planning and instigate new forms of speculation to build more wealth. Finance urbanism proceeds in an age of intensifying crisis. However, precisely what this means for cities and urban life remains to be fully articulated even as we see demands for new types of knowledge, ways of researching and forms of collective action.

The 2026 lecture series on Finance Urbanism, follows a long trajectory of sometime overlapping, sometime separate debates in how we examine these dynamic relations between the city and finance. Comprising lectures from some of the leading thinkers on finance and the urban the series offers an opportunity for a significant intervention to cohere a new set of co-ordinates and future possibilities.