Common assets for global urbanisation: The planning of ubiquitous office buildings in global financial centres

Abstract

Following lead from Lizieri’s Towers of Capital: Office Markets and International Financial Services, this paper seeks to expand upon his conceptualisation of the circulation of commercial mortgage backed securities by further considering how the planning and development process enables and facilitates certain types of development that are amenable to the needs of international finance and investment. While Lizieri (2009) provides in-depth detail of the underlying structures and mechanisms by which office buildings have been transformed into assets that are traded and speculated on in the secondary market, Dörry (2011) acknowledges that these structures and mechanisms remain disentangled from the actual processes of urban planning. This research will consider the differing development processes for office buildings in the global financial centres of Luxembourg, Frankfurt and Dublin. It will comparatively analyse ways in which local planning institutions have moved away from acting as regulatory bodies towards instead organisations that actively pursue the economic benefits attached to grounding these valuable office assets into the local built environment. Through an in-depth analysis of statutory planning documents, government policies on territorial development and unique spatial governance arrangements, the research empirically details the mechanics by which office developments are permit within financially oriented office districts and attempts to interconnect their particularities to the needs of global investors. Additionally, it incorporates grey literature from on-going office developments as well as preliminary findings from interviews with strategic stakeholders working in these financial centres. Hence, this research attempts to bridge the mechanics of financial innovation to the tangible impacts that materialise within our environment through an increasingly internationalised commercial real estate marketplace.