All rights reservedSanfelici, DanielHalbert, Ludovic2024-09-032024-09-032016978-85-7785-551-1https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14235/1926Proceedings of the IV World Planning Schools Congress, July 3-8th, 2016 : Global crisis, planning and challenges to spatial justice in the north and in the southOver the past years, the rising importance of financial markets and financial investors in the production of the urban built environment has been recognized. However, far from being simply a global, exogenous process that produces all sorts of local outcomes, financialization of the urban built environment is as much national and local a process as a global one (Ahston et al., 2014; Attuyer and Halbert, forthcoming). Additionally, to describe this process as one driven exclusively by abstract financial market forces is misleading, given that the State has been in the front line of financialization by putting in place a suitable regulatory framework to encourage financial intermediation and financial investment (Gotham, 2006, 2014). With this in mind, some scholars have scrutinized the active role played by financial intermediaries in furthering financialization, often based on the proposition that the latter should not be viewed as simply a reformulation of the rent capitalization principle long theorized by authors such as David Harvey, but instead should be seen as the process whereby financial intermediaries pool capital from dispersed investors and channel it to activities where opportunities of accumulation are identified and future profits expected (Guironnet and Halbert, 2015). Financial intermediaries are here not simply passive actors that allocate capital in response to market signals, but actively redirect these capital flows in conformity to their own collectively produced representations and expectations and in interaction with existing systems of actors at city-regional level (Theurillat et al, 2012).EnglishopenAccessconferenceObject1525-1528