The global politics of an urban age: creating 'cities for all' in the age of financialisation

Abstract Our globalised and increasingly urban world demands an understanding of how ideas about how to build cities travel to become embedded in places. In this context, private actors operating across borders such as investors, real estate developers, international consultants, global construction companies and engineering firms appear as key agents of change in cities. However, real estate developers’ interactions with local stakeholders and their role in territorialising global financial strategies have been relatively under-explored in urban studies and global discussions about our 'urban future', especially within discussions on the implementation of the New Urban Agenda (NUA). This paper aims to initiate future research on this topic, providing some preliminary reflections on the role of developers as key transfer agents in the global movement of capital and its anchoring in places through the transformation of the urban built environment. In this way, we hope to offer some clarity on the transnational movement of financial capital to new places and markets, asking how real estate developers contribute to the dissemination of a global capitalist logic across cities, and what challenges this poses to the implementation of the NUA? To do so, the piece brings together insights from policy mobility literature and recent work on the financialisation of urban developments with the aim of critically assessing whether and how some of the key objectives of the NUA can be achieved in a context characterised by heavy involvement by real estate actors in city-making.