2023 UGoveRN Keynote Lecture by Prof. Mike Raco

On May 16th, 2023, Prof. Mike Raco (Chair of Urban Governance and Development at The Bartlett School of Planning, University College London)
delivered the first annual UGoveRN Keynote Lecture with the title “The London Model – The Privatised City.“

Uh please allow me to present Professor Mike Reco he’s H chair of urban governance and development at the B School of planning not architecture so was a m so Mike’s academic Journey started at Royal hallay University in London followed by several lecture ships uh at the universities of Glasgow reading

Kings College before assuming his current position it’s worth noting that starting this September I think it’s public information by now he will also take on the role of the head of department at the B School of plan Mike’s research involves around critical te themes that shape our cities and

Societies uh he possesses expertise in the governance and planning of cities politics of urban diversity Dynamic nature of welfare states especially this theme welfare states and their transformation has been in the core of his work with a multidisciplinary background in planning geography and urban studies he also altered numerous influential Publications

One of his recent and noteworthy research projects is titled what is governed in cities which also uh gives a title to this presentation and where we also collaborated uh together for a couple of years it was a very um productive project yielded lots of Publications including his most recent

Book uh titled London which provides valuable insights derived from this project and if you are interested it’s available in our library you can have access to it Mike’s colorly contributions also include significant works of on the future of sustainable Cities state L privatization and demise of democratic

State and regeneration of London and I’m sure and I see a couple of uh students who are sitting around the table who have been uh reading a lot of M’s Publications around the Regeneration especially of the Olympics uh in London Mike it’s a tremendous honor to have you here um your research and

Teaching and diverse greatly influ influence our understanding of uh Urban governance so as a you govern group I’m very very happy that you could come in and let’s give him a war warm welcome and welcome him for his presentation well thank you for that a very warm very generous introduction and

Tuna thank you very much and I have to say yesterday I had to give a a presentation to my new school about what I would do as head of department so anything after that it was like a joyous release if I’m honest uh and hopefully I’ll keep doing some research uh on my

So-called quiet Fridays I told the department but let’s see if that really happens I doubt it um so in this presentation I’m going to talk a little bit about some of the wider writing that I’ve been doing the last I always say the last 10 years I

Guess it probably is really uh on some wider intellectual projects that I’ve been sharing with others like tuna and Sarah and Andre here in this room as well around trying to really understand some basic questions about how cities are governed who is governing them and how do they shape what happens in the

Built environments in which we live I very straightforward questions but as we’ll be seeing during the next 40 minutes or so there are some pretty complicated answers to that those questions in the London case the book I was very lucky to work with Francis Brill who was a posttop researcher uh

The Bartlet uh followed by Callum Ward I was very lucky on the project and Sarah was involved and Andre and tuna as well as a big team of researchers looking at some of these wider questions so just to acknowledge francis’s work in this and tuna says

The how do you move it on just okay as tuna says the book is unimaginatively titled London the reason uh for that rather flat title is that it’s part of a mega City series edited by Hank Savage so there’s a number of these books coming out in different cities and we

Came up with a very dramatic subtitle but it was uh just kicked out not there which I think it’s a problem actually because um if you’re looking up London it is a word that does appear quite quite a lot on Google if you put it in so the book doesn’t necessarily come up

Quite as quickly as it could but much of what I’m going to talk about today is a reflection on that and I think one other point to make at this stage is that when you have a a career moving forward um there are moments where you get a chance

To reflect on a period of work and put a Capstone on top of it in terms of some of your thinking and ideas and I guess this book in a way was a reflection of that so some of what I’m going to discuss today I have talked about in the

Past um but sometimes um you know you recycle greatest hits in a way to reinforce a bigger argument and I think there’s a kind of collection of arguments that come together uh in the text just start off with a few stories really um I mean many of you will know

Places like this in London uh the former power station on the front of Pink Floyd album in the 1970s animals great album um an area that was der for 40 years in London it was formerly one of the power stations that was part of the grid

Within the city closed in the 19 late 1970s early 1980s and it’s taken 40 years for it to be regenerated as part of a much bigger project in this part of London right along the riv 10s some of you may have seen in a just Southwest of

The center and it’s a classic example of many of the things of course that are happening in this city it’s a great place to visit by the way I mean I went there at Christmas you can go up in a an elevator big glass elevator something out of uh Charlie and

The Chocolate Factory you can go up to the top uh of one of these chimneys which originally were built in the 1930s and you get a wonderful view over London that’s a spectacular site it’s a spectacular regeneration project in every respect but there’s a couple of things about it I think are quite

Interesting to note I mean the money for this came from International sources mainly from Malaysia and other Sovereign wealth funds the entire project involved these chimneys look authentic right from the 1930s um and the person who designed the original Power Station was Gilbert Scott who’s the same architect who designed

London’s or or Britain’s post uh phone boxes like the same architect he also did some pan station and another and Bank side uh which is now the tape mod but all of those in fact are rebuilt they were rebuilt by the company involved in the development and what

Happened with this project was that it involve billions of pounds up to 9 billion pounds of investment what happens with modern projects in London and what constitutes what we call London model is that you can attract 9 billion pounds of investment but the type of development

You get is of a particular formal type in other words somebody has to pay for that development and it’s only paid through in two ways really one is through extremely expensive retail and the second one is extremely expensive real estate to purchase or to rent actually to purchase uh in this case

Every time you add a regulation in other words if you tell the developer you must keep the original form and structure of that building every time you add a regulation like that sounds good what planners do it adds to the cost the cost is then recuperated in one way and that

Is delivering less affordable housing and increasing the cost of the housing to remake the money to invest in the nice Heritage that you’ve reinvested in in other words there’s a real governance challenge here for planners because the more that you try to restrict this type of growth model and development the more

You put regulatory costs onto a development it’s only paid in one way and that’s paid by not allowing the developer then to provide housing of an affordable level in other words they say it was so expensive to do this we have to provide uh infrastructure and things

That give us a return and that just happens to be super expensive it’s part of a global phenomenon of course in the case of London um what we see here in these rather so complex apologies but the back um but what I’m trying to show in this

Since 2014 up to just before coid there’s a growing gap between what are called affordable house deliveries in London in other words the building of units that can be afforded although we’ll come back to that question later about what that is and the the developments happening in places that are curiously called unaffordable

Housing which is a strange term really because somebody’s purchasing that housing um but nonetheless it’s very very expensive and you see a greater Gap in London despite all the efforts and all the extraordinary political Capital around the debate around housing crisis what we do about it the crisis in London

Just gets bigger and bigger in terms of affordability in terms of new delivery that lack of new delivery longer term of course will only increase the Gap probably even more because it’s less and less of it in the longer term um and this is some of the problematics that we

Have been looking at at the same time uh in our project which I’ll talk about in a minute this is by Danielle Sanderson Nicola Livingston two my colleagues on the project there is a lot of investment going into new housing in London but uh it’s actually as Sarah and others have

Also highlighted in their works there Ros go here it’s going into things like student accommodation it’s going into the building of something called Bill to rent in other words a little bit better than student accommodation but actually exactly the same thing which is basically you rent an apartment uh as an

Entire unit as a professional person so these are the sorts of housing that are now being constructed in London you get some sense here that from the work we did by 2020 um you get bbsa the blue one here which is purpose built student accommodation taking up something like

Half of all the investment around new apartments in the city in other words the market is pushing investment and development in One Direction which is that there’s a lot of students there’s a lot of young professional people that can’t buy this housing’s unaffordable and it’s beginning to build units in its

Own image which is we need more units for these people as opposed to maybe building the types of housing that traditionally we as planners have said that you need as part of a sustainable Community for example family housing um family infrastructure welfare infrastructure these sorts of things are

Going to one side because where the market investment is increasingly going is where of course there are the strongest returns and those returns at the moment in terms of affordability of the students and for young professionals who can’t afford a house that is big implications as we’re

Going to see later uh for regeneration projects because what happens is in some places you see enormous developments happening but in fact there for a very very narrow group of people uh which has all sorts of implications for the places we’re trying to build one other quick uh introductory

Kind of slide is that I just wanted to point this out before I come back to to some of the examples later um we did quite a lot of work in the book it’s a whole chapter on International Investment into into real estate and Urban Development and it’s

Just worth thinking about this I think comparatively with the Dutch case and with Amsterdam and other cities in the Netherlands because yes London’s a global City yes London has particular characteristics but I still think there’s quite a few uh parallels maybe one could draw and differences perhaps too contrasts but we’ve identified in

The work and we show this in the book four different types of key investment Capital into real estate the rise of Pension funds of course uh in the case of London we identified about 18 billion about 20 billion euros worth of assets uh just in the real estate sector and

From Pension funds huge Investments coming in many of these are from international funds as well the one of the big funds investing in housing in London I don’t know if this is true here in in the Netherlands is the Canadian teachers pension fund right we had a

Canadi I had a stu it’s not a I’m not making this up I had a student in my class this year whose parents were retired teachers from Canada and um I was telling her that of course they’re making the funds and they’re making the money through London’s real estate

Market through investing in it of course so sorts of interconnection I think the second point is a key one and perhaps one that has become more significant and yet less research for Curious reasons I can’t quite understand because global capitalism is in itself changing um the rise of new Sovereign wealth funds is

Absolutely Paramount to the developments that are happening in a city like London uh I was reading in The Economist just last month that because of the Ukraine war the these count such as Qatar the Qatar investment Authority one of the biggest investors in London tamc which is the Singaporean uh pension fund and

And state sorry state fund which also is for pensions um basically what they were saying in the economist was the Petro dollars are going to suddenly flood the World Market again all these countries are absolutely overwhelmed with money dollars they don’t know where to spend it and they’re looking for places to

Park it whether it’s Manchester City Paris s gerain or football clubs or or famous racehorses but actually it’s it’s investment in big International cities and property that’s going to become again another boom potentially coming that way right so I just think this is really important because in some of the

Work we did on Chinese investment into London it’s bit of an as side but I’ll just touch on it because it’s useful here we looked at the way in which what the Chinese government does is absolutely fundamental to investment into the London housing market so if you’re trying to understand

The housing market in London and how it’s regulated and governed you can’t just look at the London level you can’t just look at what the mayor of London says this and the London plan says that and that’s where all the explanation can be found or even maybe the national

Level of course but actually what we’re seeing is in terms of Regulation that what happens in countries like Qatar or China what those governments say those investment funds should do is shaping where that investment goes increasingly other words the geopolitics of investment is much more upfront than it

Used to be it was always there right American multinationals were American multinationals obviously in the past but what you’ve got now is that the mayor of London if he wants to attract investment doesn’t really talk to a company you talk to the government of these countries that’s a difference in how we

Think about real estate investment and who the key actors are right and I think a little bit under research I don’t know in the case of of Amsterdam so much where these figures fit in couple of other things as well in the London case and in the English case you see the

Emergence of real estate investment trusts or property specific funds with all kinds of tax advantages so there’s an attempt by the British government to increase the amount of institutional investment into real estate partly to solve the housing crisis that’s bringing money to for housing and so there are

All sorts of tax benefits and so on if you can set s prop as a legally registered Investment Trust a real estate investment trust and there all these are huge players within this Market as well as we see and on top of that you have a range of investors who

Don’t really sort of property specific but don’t really fit into the institutional line who are just families like the aneli family who own Fiat and Ferrari and so on are big investors through companies like almaa in London’s real estate so again you’ve got another group of people who are if you like

Really are private companies you don’t even see their accounts necessarily you don’t know where the money’s coming from but that’s another part of this mix and then on top of that you have what we call opportunist funds like Black Rock and others who are increasingly investing in real estate I just throw

One point to all of you if you’re a planner or a lawyer or a legal planner whoever you might be how on Earth do you regulate a sector that’s in such churn and with such powerful actors in such in enormous amount of activity I just put

That two so on the one hand I’m not letting planners and develop and uh policy makers off the hooks they help to facilitate this but there are some enormous regulatory challenges around how on Earth you try to connect these things up in a way that meets public policy objectives right that’s a

Challenge for all of you to think about I think it’s a challenge for us as researchers but also as teachers like how do you teach students to work in that environment without SC in them make it extremely positive how do you do that what do you do how do you manage these

Wider processes and just one other Preamble thing for I come back to the specifics of the findings and not probably finished by sort of forish one other thing we talk about in the book and work I’ve been doing for over a decade in English context just to

Complexify so the book is not just about housing it’s also about how infrastructure in the British context has become a global industry in itself and of course infrastructure in all cities has become probably the biggest investment opportunity that exists and so one way in which capitalism is also

Changing is that in the last 20 years or so we see the emergence of funds that are exist only to provide infastructure and sometimes services on behalf of the state so there are companies like inis free people have never heard of normally who are key actors in Britain they have

54 projects they have over 18 billion pounds worth of welfare assets within the British welfare state they provide things like Hospital buildings New Roads um any type of infrastructure you could think of even where I live companies like this provide the street lights right they’re provided by private

Companies not by the state that we traditionally think is providing these things it’s not and so you’ve got this extraordinary growth of another set of players out there private Finance actors who are financing welfare infrastructure part of which is housing but actually a lot of it is about much more than just

Housing so what I do is to reflect on the work that tun’s already mentioned the wig project we also involved People Patrick legal and others in in Paris and see po we had this project between the three cities London Paris Amsterdam and we drew on Patrick’s work with Tomaso

Vital around what is governed in CI a very basic question but actually the most basic questions I think generate the most interesting answers in life and general actually and legal and vitales argue that there are three things you should look at what is governed who’s governing who governs when nobody

Governs actually I’ll come back to that point later it’s a very very interesting question about the informalities that this system creates but methodologically what we did in the project is develop an indepth powerful Deep dive description of what’s going on in these three cities rather than coming at it

With a much stronger theoretical lens of of course you know with conceptual writings on financialization of the city all this kind of stuff but we wanted to get to some deep dive descriptions in other words if you take the case of London who is governing is a really

Interesting question to ask yourself and to try to research it’s a fishlyn and so what we argue in the book and I put the arguments up there straight away and then I’ll just explain them one by one is that we argue in the book that you see a London model of

Growth L development and we describe that there are many different definitions of a model we don’t want to get too into in the book and come back on that later I think but we see as the emergence of a set of ideas that shape development practices and regulation in

The city a set of ideas is a way of thinking about what planning what development governance should be about it’s part of a wider shift in how cities and societies are governed of course and we introduced this term in the book that we’re moving away from traditional forms

Of public private partnership to the rise of what we call the Paris State a set of agencies and organizations delivering services and infrastructure on behalf of the state but not of the state um we see the emergence of companies like G4S for example the global security company that exists

Entirely to do things that the state used to do right so you go to sko airport and the people doing the security checks for G4S I think um you uh look at some of the business Improvement districts in many cities countries like Britain they’re also policed by private actors private uh

Corporations um if you think about who’s delivering the much of the infastructure around Place building and cities it’s private companies acting on behalf of the state or doing things a state used to do so it’s part of the the agendas that we’re trying to look at in the book

Are what’s left to the state by the way what is it that the state still does that’s a very interesting question because we think it’s not quite what instinctively we would say many people instinctively would say it’s all about the mayor it’s all about the local city Authority increasingly those

Organizations are just shells and they’re just getting others to do things for them we we argue that this has huge implications of what planners do planners themselves by the way in the English context are being privatized but much of the as we’ll see later Master planning process in the English system

Is written by private companies by private agencies by big legal firms but they’re supposed to be planning for all of us we’re supposed to be planning for places but I thought that was a public activity increasingly it’s not it’s done by private experts increasingly our students I think more

Of our students now go to get jobs in private consultancy they doing public sector in I don’t know if that’s true here probably not here there’s some great interesting stuff by the United Nations I’ve never really seen anyone else refer to it and I hope I’m not

Making it up because I seem to be the only person that ever found but there was very interesting work by the United Nations uh the committee on trade and development where they argued that we all have a right to regulate the places we live in I thought this quite an

Interesting idea so we play about with that in the book as well and we certainly had that as a key framing round with project with tuna and Patrick that what does a right to regul look like who has the right to regulate what does that mean is that a human right and

I think it probably is actually to have some say over how you’re regulated it’s not quite as sexy as some of the other human rights we talk about but I I think it’s fundamental uh to to to how we live our our lives and again just to preempt

A lot in the book I’m not going to go through these in detail but these are the sorts of underpinnings sorry flash underpinnings that we use in the book so argue this London model is the epitome of a growth centered development planning program so the whole purpose is you capture private

Expertise Finance generate surpluses and use those a public game it’s very much the idea you can have your cake and eat it right we know public betterment has been a big part of planning since the second world war um but this is a this is that if you like on steroids or

Absolutely super turbocharged into into an agenda in other words what we can do is cut the public sector replace it by generating growth and capturing surpluses for the public sector simp thing secondly as I mentioned the privatization of governance the rise of Paris State I’ll be coming back to that

Later a third element and again tuna’s work on this I think was was formative in earlier research that that she and others did around governing through detail so the rise of new contractual spaces as an absolute underpinning of our societies how cities are now governed increasingly you go and talk to

A lawyer rather than a politician if you want an outcome right many of the community groups we deal with in London know that work like that and there’s a whole process of what’s called judicialization going on in other words you go to the Judiciary before you bother with the lawyer why would you

Talk to a politician when they’ve outsourced everything to private companies uh sometimes under 25 or 30y year agreements why would you do that you go and talk to the lawyers they might be able to help you unpick some of those contracts they can look at some of the tech technical elements of those

Contractual spaces that’s a real change in how we think about governance I think we argue in the book it’s elite it’s very expensive we’re very very uh into I’m very interested in what what some of the Amsterdam work is showing on some of this the work of Kathleen a pistol on

The codes of capital that shape global capitalism and the way in which she writes about the growth of private law facilitating Urban projects in other words the legal frames that accountants and lawyers and consult used that are not state laws necessarily but are adopted as public policy practice but

They’re private law in other words these sectors decide what those legal framings are and professional practices they then become public policy in the case of London that is Extreme it seems as I’ll show you in a minute so in the book I’m not going to talk about all of these things don’t

Worry but uh we talk about strategic planning housing major infrastructure a large scale projects um what I’m going to do in this is briefly I want to say something about continuity and change a little bit of backgrounds the London context I think it’s really really significant then I’ll talk about the

Paris State and then I’ll finish off with some examples of some projects uh and then be done um just say one thing about uh this because um you know when I was a school boy in the 1980s in in London um I was taught in my geography

Classes that London Lon had no future nor did Amsterdam for that matter nor did Paris right their populations are falling there’ been some people were talking about counterurbanization I did whole lect even as an undergraduate in London in the early 90s we had whole lectures on counter urbanization people leaving the

City the idea that the future was big cities was not the Zeitgeist of the time and I think we need to keep this in mind when we think a little bit about Futures because um things that seem an absolute certainty at one moment in your life 30

Years later you look back and people were saying things like well the future is all um places like Veno or reading or um stevenage in England these very small scale places because it’s post Forest we’re moving into a post Forest future the small will be the transformative big

Cities have had their day I used to go to these lectures all the time about that um all those people were wrong actually they’re completely wrong I let’s just be honest about it um I won’t give any names some academics that I heard from in the early 90s but they

Were pretty wrong they it’s a reasonable supposition to be fair but they got it wrong so be careful when people say that the future is going to be just a big metropolitan cities there’s no possibility that things could go wrong I mean I think our Co might have told us

Something else will come to the very end anyway the standard narrative about London is it went from this Imperial Center to a city that have declined to clear in the 1940s 50s 60s onwards the famous book by Yates Center right academic from the US who argued that big cities were ungovernable they

Were had their day they were finished New York and London because they were too big to enable people to feel a sense of connection but they were too small to really be good strategic planners for development and so people like Yates said that they were finished but ungovernable and what’s happened is the

Standard now there a transformation to this triumphant world city uh key role played by elected Mayors in the commodification of build environments tapping into expertise resources and capacities of actors beyond the state and Beyond the nation state this is the standard narrative what we call the

Simple story uh in the book and there’s some truth of course in this so one of the things we tried to do was to do some proper historical research around some of the key framings and documents it’s a absolutely pivotal book called London World City published by Price Waterhouse Coopers

But actually including all the big players in London in the mid 1990s that argued for this shift in thinking about how development should happen really try to reorient how the city should think about growth and development of course within a bigger context as well um part of an wider academic movement people

Like Ed Glazer and others writing about try for the city you know very well if you want to read a bizarre book I mean the there somebody called Boris Johnson used to be mayor of London and became became this wonderful prime minister have a look at that absolutely

Extraordinary book The Greatest city on Earth you want to read something which is a bombastic narrative about a a world centered gr it’s a very interesting document I get my students to read it and they they love it but this these are the kinds of continuities in London’s planning

Debates I think are really interesting and I’m sure they I know that they relate very strongly to the ranad and other places here so on the one hand these we came across quite a lot of historical discussions going back to 1920s or or further about London as

Being too powerful Visa the rest of the country of course but like Amsterdam and other things how but I think some fundamental questions how strategic should London’s governance be should it be governed as one place or should it be governed as one space with multiple interconnected places and these tensions

I mean I think the tensions good possibly creative of course have been fundamental in shaping what Happ has happened over the last 30 years in London because there’s still been argued over still being resolved uh what we’ve seen in effect is London being portrayed increasingly as one space and one place

Actually as well for development downplaying the role of the places within London and the differences across the city some people called that a fallacy of composition you make it you make one London as a city I see this in a lot of academic papers people will say things like London thought this or

Amsterdam thinks that well who in Amsterdam and London it’s a very specific question question right I mean there are many londons I would argue um but these things still get battered around the planning system has been quite static we have bars in London I’ll come to you in a second the planning

System remains reliant on developers who are often understood as quite difficult to regulate in these days of the coronation celebrations at home we can think about this the crown in other words the king and the church and five aristocratic families have a collective wealth of 22 billion pound worth of land

Asset still in London so those historical ties are still there um The Duke of Westminster was the richest man in England without ever having work today in his life simply by the fact that his family owns Mayfair the growth the estate is a it’s one of those

They’re all Norman families as well by the way they all came over with William the Conqueror they the same people the Walen for example it’s really interesting that’s a different question it’s a big city um and we’re talking about 40 kmers across by about 25 it’s a

Huge area and these bars are putting we looked at the debate around setting these borrow boundaries in the 1960s 1965 um to give you some idea though the bers now like Cen um that have populations getting on for 400,000 in one local Authority area population of London keeps keeps growing

Well over n million so these are some of these are becoming super Burrows I don’t know how that relates to the population of Amsterdam is about half isn’t it I mean population around here is about what a million 800,000 you know so one B out of 32 is getting to the level of

Being half the size of Amsterdam in other words it’s a complex diverse space of course in governance terms as well potentially um not in reality and one other thing historically is that it has always been difficult to regulate property developers and the property sector in London I don’t know how again

That relates to the Amsterdam case we can talk a little bit about that historically but wonderful writing in the 1960s about the property B people Oliver marott and others about how the developers basically just did what they wanted they just ignored the planning system I mean at the time you were not

Allowed to build a building in London higher than a a London fire brigade um ladder but that a bit higher than that right and it was built in 1960s simply through effectively corruption networks and Deals made with certain politicians there’s nothing new about some of these

Things I just put that forward as well but there have been major changes too so we see the shift about London’s role as a driving force in other words with the rise of neoliberalism what you see is that governments in the UK and elsewhere in Europe back their winners they back

The areas that they think are going to be most successful and they hope the growth trickles down to the rest of the country and this this narrative is very very powerful of course and so the the agenda in London has gone from managing decline 1960s 50s to managing growth how

Do you manage the expansion of the city as a place for investment development so on I mentioned a BAC composition Peter maru’s work on his L makuza was superb about the idea of people use terms like London PLC is that’s one in corporated business that everybody in London

Benefits or does not benefit from development that everybody in London works together this is nonsense of course as we’ll see later but it’s a very powerful narrative the world City people in Britain often talk about UK PLC as in a public limited company like it’s a company it’s not a company in any

Way shape or form but it’s using that in those terms it’s just worth by the way I mean again I’d be very interested in the Amsterdam case you gave back to 1970s I looked at the greater London development plan of 1976 it does not mention developers investors or

Investment once okay it’s not on PDF maybe that’s just me not finding it um but my skills have rather been lost over the years but it doesn’t mention them it talks about housing simply as an activity by the state in terms of building housing it’s a plan without

Market it never mentions the market once I just think it’s interesting I think it’s a historical bit to the book but I think there’s a paper to be written in that and some other work to be done on whatever happened what was the market in the past what were you talking about in

Terms of the market they were developers house builders but why are they not mentioned as part of and the reason was because of course public policy saw itself was being at the Vanguard of delivering new infrastructure and housing uh a very different model to what we we have now and of course

London’s population as with many cities was purposefully reduced by public policy from the end of the second world war to the back mid 1980s so again imagine my geography classes were happening there and everybody was saying oh it’s got no future just carry on like

That and it will be the size of reading by the year 2025 of course it hasn’t population and growth have rapidly changed one other thing about London about which I think is a bit surprising despite all of the development I’m going to mention later is that outer lond

Become a more Suburban city right so we see a suburbanization of population within the city again this is interesting I think in terms of the development geography what’s happening in simple terms is people are being priced out of the center and they’re moving into places uh which are in the suburbs

Usually quite poor quality housing and they’re living in multiple occup in other words they’re living in overcrowded housing in many burs one of the interviewees we interviewed in an outter London burough said to us in an interview we’ve got a wonderful policy it’s do not build and they will come in

Other words people just moving into the B they’ve got no space to build anything else and so you just get overcrowding there but you are seeing sub urbanization as people desperately look for somewhere to live don’t say much about the experience of living in the city in this talk but I

Mean just keep that in mind perhaps as a thought for questions right second aspect I just go into a bit more detail about this the notion of the Paris State and it’s an interesting research agenda here we’ again very interested in what this could mean comparatively so we

Argue that governance NS research needs to examine the Paris State or the suite of agencies that govern alongside on behalf of or in place of State institutions three elements to that so again break this down a little bit more one is what we call the the rise of the procurement state

Secondly governance by contract I mentioned earlier and thirdly the institutionalization of Market dependence and a growth agenda so let’s start the first one of those uh the rise of of procurement in other words what we mean by procurement is getting actives beyond the state to deliver a service or

To deliver a product and then you manage them indirectly through a contract that’s really what how governance increasingly works of course um it’s a normative project we argue because the assumption is that you get better outcomes if you move governance away from old fashion vertical integration and decenter it and

Fracture it and fragment it and it’s basically a set of what we call the book into indirect arrangements and so what happens is increasingly public policy is conducted in this way somebody comes up with a demand they go to a politician the politician tries to identify a mechanism

Of procurement through which they can almost like a puppet master with a puppet they try to bring people together to deliver that public policy outcome through clever contracts through smart procurement through guess what hiring other private companies by the way to help you with procurement um thinking

About how you might develop markets of regulation in other words you might bring in people like chist water house Coopers or you might bring about Accenture or somebody else to help you govern because increasingly you’re governing through procurement and where do you find the expertise on procurement all

Just happens to be in the private sector as well so you begin to get this extraordinary uh layering if you like of procurement I just give you some idea this was just before coid so the figures would have changed I haven’t bothered to update them but

Um we found three UK treasury data and this includes transfers between departments but to give you some idea of the scale here nearly 300 billion pounds worth of procurement goes on every year within the British State up to 2020 give some idea of that so that means that through the state

There are one way or another into procurers in other words people at the end of that who are normally private companies sometimes Charities right but or social actors but still that’s a third of public spending it’s more than a third of all public spending this is extraordinary really

This is a complete change in how we still imagine that governments you pay them taxes they spend it and you have outcome uh or maybe don’t but I did anyway um but the scale of this and this was before coid right so we might expect and I’m sure we would have expected an

Enormous amount of money to pour into other private companies through procurement to deliver coid responses so vast amount of expenditure goes that why just in London I mean the latest figures I could find they weren’t great I have to say but something like 13 billion pound being spent burs alone

On contract that doesn’t include the London level either um it’s very hard to find out where the money goes um around about a third of that we think or more was spent on real estate on buildings at the same time what you have in the London context and this is part

Of the wider picture I haven’t mentioned is a great social experiment because in this is where I think we are a little bit different to the Netherlands it’s an amazing experiment going on so this shows these figures here show uh the amount of money the local authorities have to spend and

It’s gone down by in some parts of London about 65% over that 10-year period after the global financial crisis when there was a movement towards austerity local government funds have been literally decimated almost been down by by 65% at the same time as demands have gone up the public policy agenda from

Central government is of course if you have this gap between the spending and the amount you’re getting why don’t you encourage more development and capture some of the financial value from developments to fill the Gap in other words if you need a new school you need a new clinic or

Hospital building why don’t you encourage a private company to build more housing make money capture some of the value and then it begins to fill this Finance Gap that has been deliberately created to encourage that right so this is a political project or an agenda uh which is trying to push

Local planners into being more entrepreneur forced entrepreneurialism that ter exist uh be an entrepreneur but you have to be because your funds are being cut otherwise like there’s no other funding that you can have and the size of this we looked at a lot of work so what’s happening is that

The mayor of London the burs increasingly are talking about Good procurement as good governance in other words writing good contracts smart procurement this is the greater London authorities six principles of procurement enhancing social value encouraging equality Fair Employment I’m not saying necessarily there’s an interesting issue about the outcomes in

This which I’ll touch on in a minute but it’s an indirect form of governance it’s basically saying what we do is govern through the actions of others through these kinds of principles so it’s kind of what people like David Levi for kind form of indirect democracy but it influences

Public policy because private expertise and capacities open up options of policy makers you can suddenly say okay well G4S exists um why don’t we give them something to do I mean it’s as simple as that there’s a capacity there that we can use other private uh companies exist

Let’s use them to help us build new welfare systems Let’s help them to build new infrastructure and so the existence for example of a private security industry enables the rolling out of a wider security procurement program because they exist right some people have argued like l by for others that

We’re now in an era of regulatory capitalism in other words companies make enormous amounts of money by doing this they make more money in a more safe way than they would if they were doing oldfashioned things like building things making things oldfashioned things like uh being in an industry where there are

Competitors this is a wonderful way of capturing money in a way that is actually quite tied in to the state of absolutely wonderful source of money of course I’m just say one other thing I mean the in the English case not the case in places like France in the

English case the planners the developers and others also write the master plans on behalf of local government local governments now increasingly just give their Ascent to the all support but they’re written by the developers they’re written by the development agencies and that again surprise surprise the developments then reflect

What they think should be built to governance du contract I already said a few things I just want to Bor down to one thing tuna’s work on this I think is is superb uh the Netherlands context and Brazil and in England as well Robson um but I think

It’s really interesting so there got a lot of interviews with planners and developers and with planners and public actors and we ask them how do you take a public demand for some more affordable housing more democracy more engagement how do you convert that into a contract with

All these actors how do you do that what’s the mechanism by which you do it and of course the problem is that Tech that contracts are a very transactional thing and they’re very inflexible thing they’re basically setting up a contract with a deliverer develop someone to do it for you and it’s a

Transaction the trouble is that of course demands political demands social needs environmental demands as we saw in the protest downstairs today they change they shift they move around how then do you make contracts put together in a way that enables politicians to also change them without undermining their effectiveness

Without undermining their appeal to those who are being contracted no one’s got many it’s a very difficult question to answer but increasingly that’s what governing is given this wider context and what planning is and so I looked some of you may seen this before a few years back I

Did some work on basic stuff like um the I think it was 302 page contract that exists to run a train line in southeast London where I live and you you try to work out well how much do I actually pay that is the mechanism through which that’s

Agreed a couple of other things I found in that contract by the way just this is as side um one was that there’s something called Revenue support so if the amount of passengers Falls the state will recompense the private company anyway other words there’s no risk

Lity the second thing and this was great right I I I gave this talk to some some I should say this to some senior civil servants and um I said that in this contract somewhere it said if there is a strike the state will pay the private company any loss it might

Make I said this at this meeting and one of the civil servants said oh Mike strikes are so yesterday’s issue that been a year of strikes and one of the issues about that strike is that the train companies get the money anyway from the stat anyway so these are the

Types of things that are are being being put in place and of course think about the resources involved in writing these contracts the huge amounts of money it cost some people estimate that writing the contracts for the London Underground which was privatized briefly and then collapsed because it was a disaster cost

More than 3 quter of a billion pounds just right in the contract right so somebody is making enormous sums of capital through through that whole process they would argue to make it more efficient I mean we can we can argue against them again an example I gave a few years back

Um there was a big debate over London’s fire engines because these are provided under private Finance agreements they’re not really owned by the state they’re owned by private companies one of these companies went bust there was a genuine debate in the English high court about whether the fire engin should be sold to

Pay off the debt of the company because of course the fire engines are provided by a private company so if you’re using their stuff what happens if the private company goes bankrupt is it a public or a private asset huge legal argument luckily I think the high court said it

Was a public asset and that the company couldn’t do that but still it was a bit of a Jeopardy uh and a bit of a vulnerability one other thing we tried to do and I think I I think we did it quite unsuccessfully in the book i’ be

Very interested in in others uh Insight one other aspect of this is that there are an extraordinary number of private experts involved and private organizations in governing and making decisions about governance not just in delivery but in governing so we try to map all for example of the chartered

Institute so the royally prescribed in English case involved in property development and so organizations here like um chip forever it is the the the the the ones who are professional yeah have this one here so there’s a chartered procurement and Supply professional so if you have that

Accreditation it gives you the power to do that if you have the accrediation to be a chared surveyor gives you enormous power to do things but these organizations in themselves including the rtpi the planning ones help to write public policy they actually drive it and

So a lot of the work we’ve been doing touches and organizations like the Royal Institute of chter surveillance uh in England but they of course a global organization their r book on what is a good valuation around property development is fundamental to International real estate and yet it’s

Written by people they’re not in any way accountable politicians it’s written by an organization which is a private organization delivering private projects private Norms expectations and other things we’ve been looking at some of that in London it’s very interesting because in some recent legal arguments in England uh about the planning system the

What’s happened is that the judges turn to the the planning authorities and they say could you please get these organizations to rewrite the valuations because they’re the ones that are used in the planning system in other words if you want to change the planning system ask Ricks and others to change their

Rules and that will be a change in the planning system because we rely on these organizations to set the regulations that is again a real change I think I mean they’re hugely significant by the way they their office they’re very interesting organization actually they very open like to interview and talk to everyone’s

Interested but their main office is in Parliament square is is some idea of the power think in England literally opposite and their original history was that the Chartered Surveyors helped the rail industry in the 19th century so they were the the people who built effectively managed the governance of

The railways which made them such a powerful organization but they have 25,000 I think it is global members uh and other things so onto housing I going to touch on this to finish off I’ll give you some examples um a few points you want to bring out from the book growth that I’ve

Talked a lot about that it legitimates this idea of the more expensive for development the higher return potentially and the more Surplus you can capture right so there’s an incentive to promote big projects a bias towards major projects we touch on this I don’t think we did anywhere near enough work on this

I think tuna would agree on the informal or dark side of this process as well so what we argue in the book is that this reinforce this this program of governing reinforces the role of back room negotiations or informality others will go much further we don’t have any evidence for this

People like Transparency International see London’s property Market uh as one that is fundamentally built around forms of corruption for example we don’t have any evidence I couldn’t find any I I didn’t really want some my researchers into that context I’m honest but what I think it does do think about people like

Franchesco K Deli other people at the moment writing some great work around the the Dark Side of planning the idea that in fact what you should do is you have better outcomes if you keep public discussions out of the public sector in other words if you allow procurement processes to

Work by enabling people to negotiate behind the scenes the public sector gets a better deal is the argument in other words the more you know the worse off you are ignorance is good policy because it enables the the people who are negotiating some of these things to get

A better outcome that’s a very powerful uh narrative I think let me start on some examples to finish with some nice pictures um so a number of examples we look at through the book and elsewhere also did some extra work around the wly stadium development Northwest London I give this as an

Example for many different reasons partly because this was an area that was um traditionally a place of quite low value land use around an old stadium in this part of London I’ll give you some pictures in a minute if you look back at plans and again I think about this in the

Netherlands context look back at plans from the 2000 early 2000s where there were huge discussions around building sustainable communities in other words creating places that were mixed balanced places where we have a mix of housing mix of activities that was European policy as well they don’t have a

Competence to the European Union for housing they do they did talk a lot about sustainable Community planning what ever happened to that though it’s one interesting question right because I where wly is been a lot of investment in the underground and it’s up in Northwest

London so it’s on the edge of the center you can get into the center within about 20 minutes uh depending on which bit of the center you’re going to of course in London but clearly it’s pretty well connected but the projects that I look at in in some work I’ve been doing

Subsequent to the book and the next thing that we’re doing is it shifted from being a sustainable Community to really representing in the image of the market and what we talk about in this book is the way in which a company Canadian company originally but a no longer called quintain bought much of

The land around the Redevelopment area in the early 2000s they then were part of a commissioning process around the work of Richard Rogers late Richard Rogers and his firm who wrote a master plan for the area huge project that was pared imagined that was then updated in 2010

And what I’ve been doing is trying to go through those periods in the research quite interesting to look how it becomes more and more this type of mass high-rise development it is an extraordinary place to visit I know if any of you have been to Wembley uh in

Any the last two three four years but it is an unbelievable Urban environment it’s like is some cliche something out a Blade Runner I mean it is right in that sense it really is an extraordinary landscape and originally it was part of uh the British Empire games 1920s

Stadium was built huge effort have been made to to bring about this develop a huge amount look in the research the different money going in the local Authority has try BR local Authority the council try to keep some control over it by looking in some the paper that I’m

Just doing at the moment at how difficult it is to control these flows of investment into a place like that because companies like quintain in writing these Master plans are able to build environments like this in the image that really most reflects the highest return of course

For them and where the money is coming from which increasingly is from Pension funds and other places and so what’s fascinating about this development and I can’t go into too much detail here just a few points really once private actors become involved in this way there becomes a commodified site literally and

Quintain for example in 2016 were able to raise 800 a billion euros from the Canadian teachers pension fund Banks Welles Fargo and others to update and upgrade the develop vment and in ways that were never envisaged in 2004 to it is now the largest site of student

Housing and Bill to rent housing I mentioned at the beginning in London and probably I think Sarah’s research shows probably in Europe as a site we’re talking about well over 6,000 build to rent homes being constructed there huge developments I can’t explain the scale of these developments if you go to them

But by unite students for example another company which is another big investor in student housing um but why is that I mean the thing is in a way public planners have lost control of the project early Visions kind of disappeared students usually stay in their places for one year maybe two the

Average rent cycle in a bill to rent apartment in that area is just 23 months so you got this extraordinary churn of people that’s not what the sustainable communities plan originally said this place was going to be that’s the complete opposite they said it was going

To be a place that was a cohesive coherent Community but it really is different I’m not say necessarily worse or better in a normative sense just different to to what was ever imagined and it makes you think about what can planning do really it’s not meeting local needs in any sense making them

Them worse I did a lot of work around the Olympic site in Stratford I just want to touch on some of that as well because I looked at some of the debates around procurement and delivery when I’ve tried to find things out about that project and this is now typical in

London maybe typical here too you get this kind of response right things blacked out so this was looking at some of the contracts around that development who was paying the money where was it going anything relating to money through projects even if it’s coming from public sources is

Reducted not allow to see it now I queried this and I was told that well it’s good that you can’t see it because if you could see it as a citizen that negotiation would not work so well and the private sector would probably not well the public sector

Would not get such a good deal in other words I was told by the the UK informational commissioner that the public interest is the right not to know how the money is spent the less you know the better the outcome and if we were to shine a light on that as researchers

Then the negotiation might then not be quite so good they use the word it might Prejudice that process I found it’s extraordinary I have to say I mean and the idea that the commercial interests were interchangeable with the public in other words these negotiations were not things

You should see there were the things behind um quite extraordinary um I think that image is a very powerful one uh which which I showed and final example just touch on was center point I mentioned earlier I’m going to go very very quickly it’s an example of this

Company almaa this new family type of investor into London’s real estate market coming in and taking prestigious projects and going back to that building built in the 1960s that had become empty it was mainly offices that had become empty it’s on the London cross rail the new Regional Rail line that’s been

Opened up through Central London crime real estate site and I looked at the debates and also others are involved by the way the so that some of the um landed Estates I mentioned earlier have their own property development arms Frogmore Estates for example uh one of these um landed estate aristocratic

Families are also really important here I looked at the debate around that there’s huge developments going up being redone not necessarily going up and I looked at the numbers and it’s quite useful I think so a payment of what about a million euros was given to the local Authority as Surplus in other

Words they were given planning permission and as part of that planning permission the de Alma counter and others said we’ll give you a million euros for for the welfare state for welfare projects you I think that’s quite good actually in the way but when you start

Looking at the numbers I mean the price of a one-bedroom apartment and it was 1.8 these aren’t all profit obviously it’s a huge amount of money to redo but still one duplex apartment at the top is going for 55 million pounds um 131 unit so think about the flows of

Money coming through there only 13 of which were defined as affordable and these ones at the bottom here and they were the smaller ones mainly and they were 80% of the market rate affordable to who was Prof but this is exactly the type of things that’s happening in big projects I think going

Into the numbers is quite a good way of doing it what happens when things go bust um Market crises quickly lead to welfare crisis when there’s a market downturn we’ve got the energy crisis we’ve got limits on growth huge increas in costs in construction going on so

Some of these things in the model are beginning to dissipate and a couple of SES to finish off one thing that’s interesting is research I’ve been doing more recently is a few things coming out of this right so the models have actually started to around privatization public private partnership and so on

Have started to meet a lot of resistance and I think this is interesting research agenda here because I’ve been told that increasingly these projects are so lacking in flexibility are so critiqued that public actors are actually beginning to try to take things back in house they in know in other

Words they’re trying not to do procurement they’re trying to move away and so I’ve been told in some interviews recently that public private partnership is dead in Europe sort of dramatic statements I’m not sure that’s true in the English case but it may be in other parts of Europe where increasingly what

We’re seeing other the things here at the bottom so you’re seeing what Andy cumbers and others have called the remunicipalization of services where a lot of local authorities and governments are realizing that things are better done in integrated ways and they’re beginning to remunicipalization things that were privatized and that is a trend

Right places even in Britain like Wales has started to remunicipalization last for 30 to 40 years some of those are beginning to end what happens in the health sector for example when you suddenly buildings that have been run by a private company for 40 years how do you sorts of

Things so what’s left for the state to do interesting question to discuss perhaps um what should the role of other actors be in policy development it’s not necessarily A Bad Thing things I’ve been discussing maybe um who’s governing and how though I think and I finished off I

Had to mention brexit how do you finish up in a context where things require maybe arguably quite integrated responses how do you do that in a context of this sort of procurement model I’ve been talking about about governing how do deal with a climate emergency when the capacities and

Leevers you have have increasingly been hollowed out and maybe you just become one enormous procurer maybe that’s a way of doing it but it’s an interesting question in there and other the shocks this system of course coid and in the English case brexit geopolitical shocks or Ukraine being another shock can shake

Models up that you think look very very certain okay thank thank for indulging a little bit over time but so maybe what we just do collect some questions uh because we have time enough actually to continue with some Q my name is and I was wondering this might sound

Like an old question but what’s the politics this I mean obviously about politics govern um but there’s also I mean people that have been legally also representation allowing this to happen right so what is the local maybe also the national politics of this um and how

How how was it possible that this could happen how could it see through the F people that are in charge that wrote of the London great London development plan in they don’t mention the market at all apparently they were thinking that they were in charge still right so at some

Point is must have shifted so I’m curious if you can this collect some other questions yeah maybe let’s collect couple of more Um yeah yeah um I’m Gerson I’m um an assistant professor from tber University actually in legal Theory so I’m a bit of an old man out here but you put some very Thor challenges to lawyer so I felt like yeah also a bit on the spot because I I

I I must say that I know have no um direct answer to your question but um I also thought you you you mention also law at how is it regulated and how do we keep on regulating it yeah but law can also be a space for resistance right

Just like you also noted in your book that you can um how did you phrase it you you turn institutions of the Paris State against each other through legal challenges yes and and I was thinking what did how how do you what do you think about that

Because that might be um yeah law is quite inflexible so lawyers will apart from the state apart from private companies make a decision and that will influence further the deliberation I I reckon so do you think that this strategy is viable or does it lead to other problems of creating a ruling

Class of Judges instead of private companies instead of state so I wonder what you think about the leg position of lawyers in maybe one more and then and also from law school but totally not lawyer thank you for the very interesting and proper presentation and and now I have a

Question about flexibility of contracts because um I done some research in in New York Amsterdam and Hamburg on on contracts as well and especially in Amsterdam especially in hurg um you can see when um citizens mobilize um the these contracts can be opened up and can be be negotiated and often

Um the municipality has to St in also financially and in hurg even have few cases that mity bought back uh property from developers because people were rising in the streets um but um I don’t think contracts can only be transactional but they can also be relational and especially in these huge

Uh projects that take 10 years lot of things are changing so the the developers and the investors are also negotiating things informally so um I was just wondering where contracts are really transaction or are they more relational yeah let’s maybe continue like this and then we take the next

Round of questions okay yeah um well thank you for the comments and questions I mean just maybe start off with the the political projects yeah I think it’s a very reasonable point because actually the what I think about it it wasn’t so much about the politicians in here partly

Because I think I tried to argue in the book that in some way some of the the normal thinking about politicians being significant is maybe a little bit overblown in this context because increasingly they’ve hollowed out the capacity to have an influence certainly at the local level um but at the bigger

Level of course politician political projects are absolutely fundamental I think um passes two different elements of that one is that there’s a lot of writing about the rise of regulatory capitalism or the idea that there’s huge amounts of money to be made in governing and there’s some recent research on companies like mcken

And others who are themselves part of the governance infrastructure of an increasingly globalized world and in kathalina pistol’s work she talks at length about the role of international legal Frameworks in enabling all forms of investment all forms of development uh every aspect of the development process

She argu has been a good lawyer um is down to the law and it’s down to the ways in which these legal Frameworks have become internationalized so on the one hand there is a a political project of uh globalization if you like within the private what’s happening to the

Private sector what’s happening to um those who help to regulate private activity and private law from the private sectors that’s one on the public side you have actors who uh Ian I didn’t want to use the word neoliberalism um although one could argue that this is a part of a I think

More complicated than just neoliberalism but what you have is an agenda which is arguing firstly in the case of England certainly that consistently governments argue that the state cannot do things through a vertical integrated model that it is flawed that a bureaucratic structure is is um is one that is

Inefficient and so the role of the state is to tap into the resources expertise of others in order to deliver public programs um that is a model that has been reinforced since Global financial crisis to government austerity programs there’s a political project around that but it’s also I think that these things

Go hand in hand though because it seems to me that it’s the presence of private expertise and private sector actors who can deliver something for you that enables public actors to increasingly give that over if you like in terms of what they do to others so um

I give you the example of of planning gradually the planning system in England has become privatized it’s become privatized because public Actors Funds have been reduced the Gap has been filled by private planners working for developers who are paid for through the development process and so what you have is a political

Project which is allowing or leading to a structural fundamental change in how the planning system works on the one hand it’s a political project in saying that the state shouldn’t be planning things it should be a more flexible should be relying on other actors um that’s one charitable view another one

Would be that of course those companies have huge political power right companies I won’t say any names because it’s been recorded but they’re very well documented examples of those companies is also influencing public policy mckines and others recently some research has showed also help to set models in place that help companies to

Do public acting so you’ve got a variety of things going on which some people are trying to put together as a form of neoliberal thinking um but I think it’s more about it’s a combination really it’s a combination of then thinking also perhaps about austerity in the context

Of global financial crisis who you going to turn to whether this these private actors of resources and money um might even in the case of property development be Pension funds institutional funds Sovereign wealth funds how do we change the political system to enable them to help us deliver public policy whether

It’s building new houses or whatever it’s a very powerful political narrative within that uh and it is one that argues that the state can’t do these things but this shouldn’t be doing them um now that is a very I would argue as well of course there a geography to

That and much of what is in here is about a London model or about an English context I mean the scale of austerity cups in England to local government on a different scale to anywhere else in Europe uh probably only comparable to some US cities um it’s a social

Experiment it’s basically trying to entrepreneurial eyesee a local state uh trying to get them to think more and what we’ve been looking at in our research me there’s many aspects of the wig project tuna and I did but um we looked also at how the big challenge in

London is for Cent left politicians because what they’ve been trying to do is try to promote growth trying to promote new developments which are politically hugely controversial because they’re very expensive not affordable but they’re trying to cap the value from that for public projects so there we we

Argue this as a form of kind of pragmatism if you like it’s in very very very controversial because of course one answer to all of this is to say embrace the model have more development great capture the value you know why not the money’s there if it’s this if that kind

Of model is going to work anywhere it’s going to work in a city like London where there are huge some local authorities have been better than others at managing that process in some cases we’ve come across cases where they have come back to the second Point they’ve

Employed lawyers and other teams to get better contracts again in the name of a kind of type of pragmatism to say that look it’s the only game in town the language it’s used everybody uses that expression we have to do the best we can why don’t we

Employ a load of lawyers to help us capture more value and get the best out of this if we can uh again that’s been quite controversial center right uh authorities within London some of those Burrows because each bar has its own leadership uh have been a little bit

More ambivalent in fact because some of them are trying to resist development because they are conservatives right they’re trying to nimi groups if you like um but some of them ironically have embraced the agenda for more growth and what they found is that the people that move into those Bild to rent and

Apartments are tend to be left of center labor voters theyve actually destroyed their own electoral base locally by this type of housing which is very it’s a very interesting kind of perverse outcome so there are multiple levels I give you s very general answer but I

Thought the question is a very good one there are multiple political projects and there are forms of resistance as one I mentioned in the beginning and of course these things have been better and better understood that comes with the second point about the role of lawyers

Because um there is a a really I found as as a urban geographer background really and a planner um that I hadn’t ever really engaged with the writings about judicialization that are so big in political science they’re huge literatures about this and there’s much writing for example about um countries

Like Brazil and other places where lawyers have had a huge impact on social welfare what they decide is done often shapes government uh the boundaries of government action of course it always does but it has a big impact on there’s some great examples of things like contraceptives

And so on and how legal cases have shaped what is done with public policy in those context and same in the US of course at the moment um the problem is though that if you rely on judicialization firstly certainly in the English case it’s an adversarial process

In other words it’s one built around conflicts that you’re rather than it being a consensual process it’s a conflictual one may not be true in the Netherlands so much but it certainly is in the UK context so people who launch technical challenges are it’s a challenge right it’s a real fundamental

Argument against it and um that makes the role then of politicians very difficult who are trying to be more pragmatic in some cases and trying to make the best of it and then finding that some of what they’re doing is attacked legally and then there are huge judicial costs which also hugely

Expensive um so there are there are costs of of make because it comes back to the question about back to the third Point as well the question about whether it’s a good way of governing a city whether it makes sense in a more normative sense perhaps to have a situation where you

Have almost a Cascade or pyramid of contracts around which governance is being delivered and organized and it comes back to fundamental questions over the coordination of those contracts the oversight whether I give give you an example so where some of this came from originally was that the the UK

Government was saying we believe in localism as many governments across Europe do so I did a bit of a thought experiment about the neighborhood I live in in South London and I thought what do I really have control over here anyway the politicians I said in my street the

The street lights are are delivered by scansa on a 25e set contract so if I wanted to argue for more Lighting in the evening for example for you know safety or turn them off during an energy crisis things have happen I don’t go to the politician because they’ve given away 25 years

Worth of responsibility to a company and by the time you’re 10 years into that contract all the people involved in negotiating it prob be gone no one even knows what I’ve been interviewing people recently about some of these long-term contracts who suddenly realized that the contracts are about to finish

But the people that negotiated them in 2000 probably dead in some instances you know and so it becomes it becomes incredibly complicated once you add to the street lights where I live the the road infrastructure the utilities the transport all the buses are run by a French company the Goa and K were

Running the trains for a while they were so bad at it it actually collapses um where do you where are you turning in that place as a citizen even even in the case one other example case of London Community engagement is now done by private Consultants on behalf of the

Developer so all the things we’re teaching our students you know how to engage with the community and all this stuff you know you really put a heart and soul into and then the people I speak to the former students say we don’t do it anymore it’s done by the

Developer and some of them are set up their own companies students to be the so is that really a sensible way of governing it’s a question I’m I haven’t really answered it but I’ve found up but but I’m interesting in your point I mean in terms of where lawyers can come into

This there could be a very strong Progressive element to that as well which we do show in some of the the work they they could but the funny thing is also they then you are putting the owners on on on a professional group of people which especially see themselves

As service providers yes and lawyers see yeah we draft contracts they draft contracts for the one that pay for drafting of contract we don’t do anything I mean you’re in a court of law not in the court of Ethics so lawyers see themselves often as not all because

There are some activistic lawyers but many of course see themselves as a basically service provider middleman yeah abely yeah yeah yeah we uh there’s still a question I think it’s partly also just back to point about relational contract um um yes is a short answer they are becoming more relational they always

Have been but um there is a lot of interesting research to show that the power in contract writing lies with those with the most resources and skills and knowledge where do those people exist I mean and what’s happening is that there’s a passes back to some of

The legal people there’s a huge argument over the balance between more standardized contracts that appear to give public actors more control because he us standardized good practices and the flexibility of contracts to deal with local circumstances and differences many of the private companies don’t like standard contracts they like their own

Contract in a different more relational way so again it’s another hugely politically contentious point because um the answer that the British government always gives to everything is standardized because they somehow putting the same model on top of everywhere will structure the relationships um that’s not what private companies

Want and there’s a negotiation that goes on around that um so uh yeah there’s a lot of great there’s a lot of work about relational contract the work you talk about your I mean is actually excellent on this stuff there’s not enough people write about that work on contract as a

Relational practice um there are some anthropologists WR about this um anelise ri’s work on the ludicrous nature of contracts that are given this very formal status but as she showed in her work half the contract often remains on the photocopy someone forgot to pick it up there no one actually ever read the

Contract um you know very interesting anthropological writing about that which I think again is also hugely important part of some of this okay I saw some hands yeah Y and Dan and thank you m rich and interesting Talk t I want to um continue with value capturing which

Um you say well that that is a very dominant development at the moment legitimation of how things go one you say but is there you question whether there value Capt you gave the example of a multi multi million project where was thrown at the one thing on the other hand uh the value

Capturing is probably not even enough to fill the de that is left bying of the welfare state or having said that London is also a very attractive place also because of reasons outside the politics of the city itself so there is a lot of money to be

Made is it thinkable that we come up with very different systems of value capturing that that would would yeah enable a better public sector we we had value Capt is not in itself something new u in the past we called it taxing and what you see is that that in

Part of this whole story that you have is that you get a project spatial logic to to where money is made and and put into the collective well in the past cityon there were all kinds of mechanisms land lease was also housing where money was made value was captured

But then redistributed on the level of um why why why didn’t you lose that kind of mechanism or do you see still still see room for things maybe let’s collect questions yeah yeah thanks very very promot and so I bring back what you thought you provoked in me

And so as a question to you as an academic but also to us so in such a context don’t we think you think we have a choice between two options one is putting our energy as Educators researchers in try to understand how to use such a system for

Good choice that choice is to say you know this system is fundamentally wrong so we should put our energy in imagining experimenting with Alternatives so do you think we have this choice and if you we do what is your choice I think Willam still had one more

Question yeah it backs bit on what what what you already asked basically referring also to to my previous question so isn’t there any sort of endogenous change within the labor party for instance for people that are actually running a campaign that is focusing on dismantling this system and and

Therefore indeed sort of try to capture value through a more municipalization Social Democratic agenda of capturing the value and redistributing it among the people so is there no electoral potential for actually running such a campaign I see one more question from M yes hi I’m I’m a PhD student I have a

Very simple question actually what’s your opinion on social value act um I mean your presentation I was trying to diges it’s very informative and very but I also feel that there’s this whole progress over the social value of what’s the purpose if things are not moving towards that dire

Okay okay than you can okay thank you again for the the comments questions we come back to the value capture angle first or betterment it used to be called in English context um well you I think what you hit the nail on the head really which is the

Issue is around land ownership and its cost and what you see in a place like London is that on the one hand the investment flows you would think would make it an obvious place for Value capture uh but the consequence of Market action to generate finance and generate

Return inflates the cost of land and cost of development and so you have a cycle that emerges where even in the case of someone like Wembley where there are huge amounts of money being made any attempt and recently in 2022 the local Authority has tried to add some extra measures to capture value

Because there’s so little public benefit they’ve been again challenged in legal process by the developer quintain because they are saying that if you put any additional burden we cannot generate the returns to make a profit therefore we will not make the development happen right so you’re always in this position

Where development is only conditional what’s called VI what’s called viability in the language of public policy in England it’s only viable and one of the things that these professional bodies have set is that a standard form of profiteering in London or in other places in England big cities is about 15

To 20% profit so if you can’t make 15 to 20% profit you won’t build any affordable housing you won’t have any money to capture and so that’s how the developer think the think but to be fair to them the land is so expensive and the development is expensive it’s a costly City for

Development that actually that’s a difficult planning problem because the more you try to impose what seems like a huge flow of resource actually becomes incredibly costly if you add more planning restrictions and so this is the problem with a market oriented system that the other side of that is of course in

Places without much growth you don’t get any development any value capture at all because there’s nothing to capture there’s very little profit to be made right so we got this is a it’s a fundamental difficulty and you’re absolutely right it’s an interesting discussion not just in England but

Elsewhere about capturing land values in different ways you know the way in which taxation has shifted in many European countries is towards well not shifted hasn’t shifted enough it’s mainly about income whereas in fact what you now have is land and development as asset class which is where the real inequalities lie

Of course they’re related to income as well but the big inequalities in a city like London are how much you own if you own your own property you yourself have become part of that privatized kinism that’s been written about the last C years you rely on your asset for your

Own welfare welfare is being cut back for public sources so you rely increasingly on your private welfare it goes on and on and on so there’s there a vested political interest in certain people people maintaining those property values which just adds to the difficulty of a debate about changing the system

This is what Mrs ster always argued about the liberalism once you embed it into people’s lives it’s very hard to take it out again and that’s exactly what goes on so I think there are the the linkoln instituted in some interesting work at the moment on different forms of value capture uh so

And Community Trust and these sorts of things it’s an interesting debate going on but it’s a debate that’s coming a little bit late I think so it’s a debate that’s always been there actually but but it’s coming a bit late in the current context that’s helpful I I just

With the lawyers here there are things called section 106 agreements in which are supposed to be the legal agreement between a local Authority and a developer or house Builder about the amount of what’s captured the trouble with those is that they always backload the public benefit so the developer says

I need to make the profit first then in 10 years time I can provide this the affordable housing or the clinic there’s a lot of anthropological research to show so people forget that sounds extraordinary to think that the public policy actors move on and then

What did they ever agree to and then the developer says well the Market’s gone down there was coid you can’t expect us to provide it even though that stage they’ve already built a lot of Housing and generated a lot of profit they can no longer find the value at the end

Right so there a huge arguments going about that it’s a very ineffective form of capture actually in that sense um the other questions very quickly so go on um so Lucas’s question about uh where do I sit with that um that’s a very good question becoming a head of Department

Because of course uh in in the English case the the rtpi also helps to shape the pedagogy of planning profession and teachings in other words we have to teach courses I don’t know if that’s true for the Dutch planning Institute any but here I can see some Smiles I

Mean in England sorry you have to you have to get things accredited by the Royal town planning Institute they tell us what needs to be taught so that’s part of the problem in terms of what we can deliver to people I me I’m saying that as a head of school coming up it

Does um but I think what you do of course is you you teach planners to be critical social scientists I think and also give them the skills they need to do the job and the interesting thing is that that second part has become more I didn’t mention financialization much in

The talk but it’s become more financialized and about contract understanding contracts you know former students say that’s where they’ve former students say that’s what they need to know about uh we’re under pressure to provide them with more critical social science interpretation so I I think that’s very

Very really pretty and I think your question is absolutely right it is a pretty fundamental challenge to us as as teachers as well the pedagogy of built environment work what are we trying to do right what should they know about should they be hearing more from lawyers

And others yes I think is the answer to that well what do they then hear less of can’t do everything so what is less important and I still think Community engagement stuff is fun fundamental in co-production and other things but co-production in this context is is as

Tun as other workers shown as a real Challenge and then finally on social value act so there’s a piece of legislation in England 201112 which was called social value act it was supposed to be a way of rethinking value through more foundational economics kind of Route although that’s not the language of

Course that the people who invented it thought about it they thought about it in terms of discussions we’ve had here in other words you can provide social infrastructure in a way that doesn’t come from the public sector it comes from other sources but we can use it um there I

Mean there’s a lot of local instances where local authorities have tried to use those acts I haven’t done any direct research on that but I know that they are met and confronted with these structural forces in some ways though there are other areas where and there’s some interesting examples in

London where for example what you find is where it’s not a local Authority but another public body for example an urban development corpor operation that’s given land they’re able to use that much more effectively and give land to certain Community projects and other things so there’s a again back to the

Point made earlier land ownership potentially is key whether the public sector could own more land what’s happened is that local authorities and all public agencies in England have been forced to sell land right there was a huge audit done of all public assets and they should sell them right Boris

Johnson set up a an automatic map in London of all public sites for developers to look at and say I want to buy that I want to buy this uh and so in the English case what you’ve seen is a hollowing out of public assets many of

Those things are things like land for community centers and stuff like that which have been hollowed out by governments being told they have to push it back into the private sector uh and that’s been a huge problem it’s the opposite of the social value agenda right so there but one final Point more

Positive night I think and in fact some of the people here have been been I think leading on this is the debate about foundational economies I think there’s a lot of really interesting work going on around how you you start from that point and say that we need to think

About the foundations that make a place what it is how do we build those foundations from the from not just the bottom up but also the top down how do we get everybody to coordinate I think that’s a very positive agenda coming through and then remunicipalization work

Andy cumers and others I think it’s beginning to show that there’s some political mobilization of some of those agendas as well going on um not so much in London but elsewhere do we have more questions mark yes please yeah I’m CH from University of wyomi and visit uh the

Geography Department here yeah and I have a question because you mentioned about the U Canadian pension fund invest in UK and but it’s very interesting that uh Canada just passed the law this year they try to set an mutation for the foreign Capital to invest on the real

Estate market so I I don’t I’m have been very curious about how UK treat this foreign Capital uh especially in the housing market yeah so what happened was in 2012 as part of this discussion been talking about the national government launched a review by somebody called montue who’s a property developer so it

Became known as the montigue review and it was a review to try to to work out ways of setting regulations to encourage institutional investment to come into the English property market and that’s the part of the background some of the discussion here actually in terms of the

The shift of opening things up in ways that would allow the Canadian pension fund if you think about what it is that institutional investors want they want long-term returns they want guaranteed markets as much as possible with few risks in the long term and what’s interesting is that the people that fit

That bill are are paradoxically short-term renters who are students who are going to pay for the room and then you can keep on putting the rates up I mean some of those rooms in those places in Wembley are well over 1,500 pound a month example um you can

Keep on you know um you also want to attract this is some one of the interviewees told us I went to say from which company not in Wembley so else said our ideal tenant is a public sector worker who can’t afford their own house and will never will struggle to move and

They’re never going to get a big pay rise so they’ll never leave in a hurry like someone in the private sector who might get a big and so they make wonderful um patient payers in a sense their patient Market they will pay us long term and so there’s all sorts of

You know the the the ethics of that of course Very problematic you only talk but it’s the logic of a market system in the case of Canada I’m just so what I thing their Pension funds and other things have been uh leaders in this process internationally they invest also

In a lot of airports and I don’t know who invests in skipo but Manchester Airport for example has there’s other places where these Pension funds have been extremely active uh and it’s going to become more active because there are more more pensioners in the global North

The longer term and so some people will say that’s a real opportunity of course because it’s a way of this is what the to reviews about trying to tap into a source of finance and get them to build what you need for Public Policy social policy but with some of those

Implications that I think we discussed but also don’t forget a lot of units have also been built so things do happen as well thanks Mike I think I don’t want to Tire you anymore it was wonderful I had a fundamental question myself but I’ll

Leave it to K we are there for drinks I was going to ask you what kind of a state you prefer but it’s a maybe a fundamental uh question um on behalf of the you govern I would like to give you a little present and thank you so much for coming

Here before we close off I would like to thank to the star of this organization Anna hug which is sitting over there she’s The Apprentice uh student who coordinated the entire day today and tomorrow thank you Anna P he’s not here right now Andre leara and Sarah thank you very much for

Being involved and in this organization and thank you all for being here and if you are Thursday and if you want to join us we will go to Korea to have drinks first drinks are on the UK group