Lecture Three; Urban Virtualism And The Socio-Technical Organisation Of Expectations

Professor Adam Leaver, School of Management

Property-led urban development is sustained by a valuation process that draws on assumptions and artefacts about future occupancy, rents, financing costs, operating expenditure and exit yields in order to assign present day values to housing assets. Build-to-rent housing, for example, gains its attraction as an asset class not only from the rental income flows that accrue, but from the capacity to capitalise expectations of future rental growth into current asset values, which are booked as profits. This lecture draws on Daniel Miller’s concept of ‘virtualism’ to examine how abstract representations of the future become both organising forces and destabilising mechanisms in the material development of cities. Miller contends that economic abstractions can become self-fulfilling - that economic and organisational life can be reorganised to conform with the visions contained within those models if, for example, financial projections influence planning decisions, direct public subsidies, attract overseas investment and so on. The lecture asks how long property-led urbanism can sustain its virtual future when the magnitude of our social and economic challenges suggests that cities are unlikely to conform to it.

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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.