Call For Papers: Value Capture and its Dissents AAG Annual Meeting 2020 (Denver, 6-10 April 2020)
Organizers: Hung-Ying Chen (Durham University) and Renee Tapp (Harvard University) Sponsored by: Economic Geography Specialty Group, Urban Geography Specialty Group For cities and states with big dreams but limited budgets, value capture is quickly emerging as a silver bullet strategy to finance urban development. The premise is simple: cities should recover the value generated by public expenditures from private property owners. Leveraging regulatory tools and public financing instruments-taxation, fees, permits, rights, options, bonds, trust, and local service agreements-cities unlock value in the under-utilized built environment, bolster demand for these assets in the private sector, and reclaim value at a later date. While value capture unites a wide range of urban actors from central and local states to think tanks, development banks, and Keynesian economists, critics argue that in practice value capture is a resource frontier to channel windfall gains. These critiques ultimately call into question the state's ability to wrestle value back from the private sector and financial markets. At both an empirical and conceptual level, the emergence of value capture interweaves fiscal geographies (Tapp and Kay 2019) with real estate financing (Chen 2019; O'Neill 2018; Tapp 2019; Weber 2016) as the cyclical imperative of devaluing and revaluing property (Knuth et. al 2019) becomes both the means and ends that drive urban futures (Dunning et al. 2019). To explore the various linkages between public and private finances, this session seeks to bring together scholars and researchers working across the globe on issues related to the promises, operations, and pitfalls of value capture. We invite papers that empirical engagements and/or theoretical interventions that examine the relationship between value capture and the built environment. Possible themes include but are not limited to: * Public instruments and tools that connect local property markets, public finance, and financial and capital markets; * Measurements for valuing infrastructure and real estate, and/or the limitations of these techniques; * Phases and cycles of value capture, such as the processes and mechanisms that (de)valuate, monetize and 'recycle' captured value; * Deal structuring and legal frameworks used in public-private arrangements; * Consideration of how value capture operates at different scales and across political jurisdictions; * Global policy transfer and local adaptation of value capture techniques among policy-makers; * The political and economic limitations of value capture; * Contested valuations, disruptions and dissents over value capture policies and projects. Abstract Submission Please send your abstract (max. 250 words) to hung-ying.c...@durham.ac.uk<mailto:hung-ying.c...@durham.ac.uk> and ct...@gsd.havard.edu by October 25th, 2019. References Chen, H.-Y. 2019. Cashing in on the sky: financialization and urban air rights in the Taipei Metropolitan Area. Regional Studies 0(0), pp. 1-11. doi: 10.1080/00343404.2019.1599104. Dunning, R. et al. 2019. Is there a relationship between planning culture and the value of planning gain? Evidence from England. Town Planning Review 90(4), pp. 453-471. doi: 10.3828/tpr.2019.29. Knuth, S. et al. 2019. In value's shadows: Devaluation as accumulation frontier. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 51(2), pp. 461-466. doi: 10.1177/0308518X18806112. O'Neill, P. 2018. The financialisation of urban infrastructure: A framework of analysis. Urban Studies , p.0042098017751983. doi: 10.1177/0042098017751983. Tapp, R. 2019. Layers of finance: Historic tax credits and the fiscal geographies of urban redevelopment. Geoforum 105, pp. 13-22. doi: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.06.016. Tapp, R. and Kay, K. 2019. Fiscal geographies: "Placing" taxation in urban geography. Urban Geography 40(4), pp. 573-581. doi: 10.1080/02723638.2019.1585141. Weber, R. 2016. Performing property cycles. Journal of Cultural Economy 9(6), pp. 587-603. doi: 10.1080/17530350.2016.1212085.
