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.
Lecture One: Money and Morale: Finance and the Politics of Hope in Climate-Changing Cities, 13th October, 3.30-5pm, Teaching Room 1, Geography and Planning Building
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.
Lecture Two: Dark cities and Oligarchic Formations: Illicit finance and money influence in contemporary cities, 3rd November, 4.15-5.45pm , Teaching Room 1, Geography and Planning Building
Professor Rowland Atkinson, School of Geography and Planning
Knowledge of the rich and their influence is important because it compels us to reflect on the possibility that money power may triumph over other forms of representation, undermine active and democratic forms of politics, and damage the capacity of citizenries to secure key resources such as housing, health and educational provisions. This presentation considers two key issues relation to such questions of knowledge, power and wealth/resource. First, we will look at the dark city phenomenon in which illicit financial flows form major investment conduits in key hubs like London, New York, Dubai, and Hong Kong. Here the effect is one of intense gains via combinations of illicit and conventional financial processing that generates a hollow or darkened city as revenues are diverted away from social investment. The second phenomenon is the development of ‘oligarcities’, urban spaces in which wealth-influence is becoming increasingly evident. Here reflections are offered on an upcoming five-year project that will examine the role of ‘oligarchic formations’ of the rich and delegated actors in key cities today.
Lecture Three; Urban Virtualism And The Socio-Technical Organisation Of Expectations, 18th November, 3.30-5pm (UK time), Teaching Room 1, Geography and Planning Building
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.