Do financial models reshape un-cooperative cities? On urban founder’s profit and collaborative-communicative planning in times of austerity

Abstract

This paper develops a conceptual approach to articulate the political-economy inspired literature on the financialisation of cities with a critical reading of collaborative-communicative planning theory to recognise the active role of planners in the multi-scalar, collective ‘making’ of financialisation by cities. More particularly, I stretch Hilferding’s original idea on founder’s profit, which was associated with the financial gains obtained from Initial Public Offerings and trading of company shares in open markets. In collaboration with private investors and producers of urban space, planners in cash strapped cities and states search for solutions to invest in better cities by anticipating their exclusive rights to various streams of income, while co-promoting and extracting part of urban founder’s profit in doing so. Nevertheless, a communication that is framed around the representational spaces and language of financial models triggers planners’ increasing entanglements with finance in the transformation of cities into abstract tradeable income yielding assets. A methodological-heuristic case study illustrates how tracing the models enables us to follow the money, exposing the contradictory role of collaborative-communicative planning and demand for a project with alternative time-space epistemologies.