Recognising the Real Value of African Cities

Frances Brill warns that the urge to conduct academic research through an Anglo-American lens may skew findings

Innovative Governance and What it Means #LSEAfrica Summit

After attending the opening session of the LSE Africa Summit, LSE’s Frances Brill recounts some of the ideas exchanged by academics

Creating a sustainable model for the tourism industry

LSE’s Frances Brill discusses the challenges faced by some African countries in building a sustainable tourism industry

Novel approaches to governance in Africa could lead a worldwide revolution

Frances Brill reports on what could soon be a changing order in global ideas

Three things a year of sociology has taught me

Frances Brill, who completed her MSc in Sociology in 2014, reflects on what she learned during that year. Let me beginning by introducing my background and myself. I graduated from an undergraduate course trained in classical economics, law and normative urban planning processes. I spent the final year of my undergrad writing a dissertation on the intersection of class and gender and I was desperate to study Sociology. All of my friends are brilliant people who have worked very hard to get their degrees and their corporate jobs but as I was awarded my degree, I was unaware of how little I questioned the texts we read or the privilege I was surrounded by. A year in the Sociology department has changed me, it’s an ongoing process and I am not going to pretend I can fully comprehend my own privilege (or classical Sociology’s writing styles) but I am making progress

How to Make a City into a Firetrap: Relations of Land and Property in the UK's Cladding Scandal

Despite legislation banning combustible cladding materials after the 2017 Grenfell fire, at least 10,000 buildings were still awaiting remediation in 2022. This is in large part because fragmented ownership and management structures alongside the specificities of British property law produced a situation in which individual apartment owners (leaseholders) were liable for the costs of remediation rather than those who own the buildings (freeholders) or the developers who built them. Faced with unaffordable remediation bills, leaseholders became stuck in uninsurable, unsellable, potentially fire-prone units. Through the case of a London housing block, we trace the relationship between the structure of landed property, value extraction, and the distribution of risk to understand how a significant portion of the UK's housing stock have remained firetraps. We argue that institutionalised value grabbing not only created the conditions of social murder but also became an obstacle to remediation, resulting in a politically charged “asset class struggle” over the way in which the structure of housing property and its capitalisation mediates social harm

Sourcing and commodifying knowledge for investment and development in cities

In this paper we analyse the role of knowledge and research teams in urban development, drawing on the case of London’s residential market. We argue that in large real estate advisory firms, the brokers and consultants who mediate the arrival of investment into a particular site or city are reliant on research teams, which are often hidden from public awareness and under-researched in academic discussions. To acquire sufficient data to meet research demands, advisory firms have vertically integrated new types of knowledge through the acquisition of firms working “at the coal face”, exemplified by estate agencies. Firms commodify the knowledge acquired to reinforce an oligopoly of development consultancy in London. Ultimately, this role – helping other estate professionals navigate the politicized nature of residential development through research-driven work – increases the cost and complexity of urban development processes. Empirically, we critically interrogate: the ways in which knowledge practices are institutionalized at a corporate level and then integrated into wider development practices; the role of specific teams within these practices; and how such knowledge-based activities enable the active seeking out of new geographies of investment. Theoretically, this paper advances urban studies by demonstrating the complementary nature of quantitative and qualitative knowledge. It also uncovers, unpacks and evaluates the activities of under-researched parts of the real estate profession, consultancies, in turn suggesting the ways in which knowledge and expertise have consequences for urban development and investment

Conceptualising 'residential investment': separating the inseparable in asset-based economies

The growth in residential real estate investment internationally since 2008 has led to an explosion of research on residential investment, across economics, sociology, housing and urban studies, geography and planning. But there remains an underlying question of what exactly is meant when we talk about ‘residential investment’. This paper analyses the way that ‘residential investment’ is used as an analytical category within different theoretical approaches to mean slightly different things, with different implications for policymakers. Further to this, we show how these different conceptualisations of investment are related to one another, in the case of the UK. The paper uses empirical material drawn from archive research on the development of the UK housing system to reflect on the vast literature on financing, financialising and investing in residential real estate. This paper makes two key contributions. Theoretically, it clarifies and questions the conceptual divisions created between different forms of residential investment. Methodologically, we demonstrate the benefits of a historical approach, which we argue reveals the path dependent nature of residential investment processes and practices

Between Global and Local: Urban Inter-referencing and the Transformation of a Sino-South African Megaproject

In 2012, a Chinese developer, Zendai, purchased 1,600 hectares of land in Modderfontein, Johannesburg, and announced plans for a new urban megadevelopment. Hiring a Chinese designer, the company released a series of computer-generated images. Drawing on these, the media and many in the city perceived the site to be distinctly “Chinese,” rooted in futuristic, speculative visions of urbanity. At the same time, African urban research turned its attention to similar large-scale projects throughout the continent, and has continued to speculate on their consequences. Building on these two different interpretations of Modderfontein, this paper engages with the site as a manifestation of both global trends (e.g., increasing Chinese engagement with Africa, urban inter-referencing throughout the Global South) and a reflection of place- and context-specific factors. In doing so, we focus on the ordinariness of the project to interrogate how the idea of creating an ultramodern global economic hub, rooted in the experiences and practices of a Chinese-based developer, was in the end mediated by the actions of international consultants and the City of Johannesburg. We suggest that Modderfontein should be seen as a generative form of urbanism where elements perceived to be Chinese were lost in the master planning process. We argue that the socio-material dimensions of the project instead reflect a distinctly South African urbanism

GTA teaching outside the classroom: contributions and challenges of GTA teaching on fieldtrips.

Fieldtrips are an essential, and much loved, part of many university courses. For Geographers in particular, they form a core part of the curriculum. This paper focuses on the GTA experience of fieldtrips, synthesizing the benefits for students, faculty, and GTAs, whilst also highlighting some of the challenges involved. We argue that, on the one hand, fieldtrips are sites where GTAs can learn how to teach, develop as researchers and can be leveraged as opportunities to get to know more senior members of staff and receive mentoring. Further, GTAs also have valuable and unique contributions to make to fieldtrips, such as acting as a middle person breaking down the student-teacher boundary and enhancing teaching by drawing on their own relatively recent experience of being taught as well as their current status as active researchers-in-training. Throughout, we reflect on how GTAs involvement in fieldtrips extends their ambiguous position within the academy (Muzaka, 2009), which might require some additional boundary-defining work on fieldtrips to use this potential without giving in to its pitfalls. For the potential benefits of GTA teaching on fieldtrips to be best realised, we end the article with a number of concrete suggestions for academic departments, staff leading fieldtrips and GTAs themselves on how to prepare and implement fieldtrips so as to make the most out of GTAs working on fieldtrips