Callum Ward

In this paper we draw on the findings of a mixed methods research project that has examined the production, regulation, and delivery of housing in London. Our aim is to develop fresh insights into the growing mobilisation of numbers and targets in contemporary planning systems. More specifically, we bring two fields of literature into conversation. First, drawing on recent contributions from Pike et al. (2019) we develop their notion of 'city statecraft or the art of city government and management of state affairs and relations (p.79). We discuss how and why their framing of contemporary urban governance captures current trends in contemporary cities, including: the financialisation of housing and infrastructure; the rolling-out of delivery-focused public private partnerships; and the broader political projects that underpin planning priorities. The paper combines these insights with wider writings in urban studies on virtualism or the analysis of theories and governmental practices that seek to make the world conform to pre-existing ideas, rather than describing and explaining its formation. We argue that target-based forms of governance represent the implementation of a virtual statecraft in which the material realities of actual places become simulated worlds, ripe for calculation and re-making. We show, through in-depth research on housing regulation and investment/development trends in London, the ways in which virtual forms of statecraft are developed and implemented and with what effects on the material outcomes of urban development processes. The findings are of comparative significance as planning systems across Europe and beyond are becoming increasingly focused on market-oriented oriented forms of planning in an effort to boost the production of housing and to deliver social policy outcomes.

Digital personal data is increasingly framed as the basis of contemporary economies, representing an important new asset class. Control over these data assets seems to explain the emergence and dominance of so-called "Big Tech" firms, consisting of Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google/Alphabet, and Facebook. These US-based firms are some of the largest in the world by market capitalization, a position that they retain despite growing policy and public condemnation-or "techlash"-of their market power based on their monopolistic control of personal data. We analyse the transformation of personal data into an asset in order to explore how personal data is accounted for, governed, and valued by Big Tech firms and other political-economic actors (e.g., investors). However, our findings show that Big Tech firms turn "users" and "user engagement" into assets through the performative measurement, governance, and valuation of user metrics (e.g., user numbers, user engagement), rather than extending ownership and control rights over personal data per se. We conceptualize this strategy as a form of "techcraft" to center attention on the means and mechanisms that Big Tech firms deploy to make users and user data measurable and legible as future revenue streams.

Revisiting attempts to connect comparative political economy and the geographies of finance, we present a balance sheet analysis of financialisation in the UK, Netherlands, and Germany from 1992-2012. We define financialisation broadly as a trend towards a greater reliance on assets and/or debt, with particular manifestations across different domains of the economy: a greater reliance on financial tools and metrics for the state and non-financial corporations, a shift to market-based banking and increasing dependence on credit or asset-based welfare for households. We use OECD time-series balance sheet data and qualitative accounts drawn from the literature to overview economic change in our case countries. Using this informal comparison we develop the concept of 'variegated financialisation' by exploring the common but not convergent financialising trajectories of our case countries and relating them to the politics of finance's institutional embedding.

In this paper we argue that 'assetisation' has been a central axis through which both neoliberalisation and financialisation have encroached in the post-Fordist era. We focus on the mobilisation of land as a financial asset in northwest England's former industrial heartlands, offering an account of how property developer 'The Peel Group' came to dominate the land and port infrastructure of the region through aggressive debt-led expansion and, in particular, a hostile takeover of the Manchester Ship Canal for its land-bank. In doing so, we illustrate how the capture of local resources by private corporations has shaped both substance and process of neoliberalisation from the ground up. By focusing on transformative struggles over land we contribute to research agendas attempting to understand the systemically dispossessive nature of assetisation, its relationship to fictitious capital formation, and the way in which such neoliberalising transformations are produced through grounded and situated socio-spatial struggle.

In this introduction to a Virtual Special Issue on land rent, we sketch out the history of land rent theory, encompassing: classical political economy, Marx's political economy, the marginalist turn and subsequent foundations for urban economics, and the Marxist consensus around rent theory during geography's spatial turn. We then overview some of the contemporary strands of literature that have developed since the breakdown of this consensus, namely political economy approaches centred on capital-switching, institutionalism of various stripes, and the rent gap theory. We offer a critical urban political economy perspective and a particular set of arguments run through the review: first, land is not the same as capital but has unique attributes as a factor of production which require a separate theorisation. Second, since the 1970s consensus around land rent and the city dissipated, the critical literature has tended to take the question of why/how the payment exists at all for granted and so has ignored the particular dynamics of rent arising from the idiosyncrasies of land. Amongst the talk of an 'Anthropocene' and 'planetary urbanisation' it is surprising that the economic fulcrum of the capitalist remaking of geography has fallen so completely off the agenda. It is time to bring rent back into the analysis of land, cities and capitalism.

Economic rents are usually characterized as a distortion of markets, a corruption of politics, or unearned (and undeserved) income; similar analytical and normative framings stretch across the political economic spectrum from right to left (Piketty 2014; Sayer 2015; Standing 2016; Mazzucato 2018). Geographers are increasingly (re)engaging with the issue of rents, rent-seeking, and rentiership at different scales, in different places, and to different effects. While some focus on the emergence and development of new modes of rentier capitalism, others are more focused on mapping out the nitty-gritty, everyday practices entailed in the making of rents through the enclosure of assets. Across these different approaches is a common sense that, for those looking to extract value, a wide world of rents is beckoning — with all the problems it entails.

Theme Overview Unicorns stalk Silicon Valley (promising huge returns to investors), big pharma ramps up drug prices on the back of knowledge monopolies (buying back their shares with the profits), multinational corporations hide 'their' intellectual property in offshore shell companies (avoiding much-needed taxes), and governments turn the air we breathe into a financial asset (giving it away to polluters). Contemporary capitalism is different; it is increasingly dominated by forms of rentiership rather than entrepreneurship, by the extraction of economic rents rather than the creation of new products and services. Economic rents can be defined as the 'value' extracted from the socio-natural world as the result of the ownership and control of a particular resource (or asset), primarily because of that resource's inherent ​ or ​ constructed degree of scarcity or quality. The central contribution of this special issue is to unpack how economic rents are made and how then to analyse and understand – theoretically, politically, and ethically – the diversity in the modes of ownership and control of resources and assets in contemporary, technoscientific capitalism. This unpacking opens up new and distinctive opportunities to return to some of the classics on economic rent, as well as engage with more recent literatures pushing forward debate in this area. These emerging debates about rentiership centre on issues like distributional inequality and conflict (Piketty 2014; Sayer 2015); extractive sociotechnical platforms and prosumer network effects (Langley & Leyshon 2016); valuing and monetizing nature (Campling); and intersecting changes in existing markets with emerging data markets (Fields 2018). Questions In light of the apparent spread and prevalence of economic rents, rent-seeking, and rentiership in our societies, we invite contributions that examine 'rent' in its diverse forms and manifestations, as well as 'rentiership' defined as the practice and process of constructing economic rents and rent-seeking. This raises a number of possible questions (others are also welcome):

Unicorns stalk Silicon Valley (promising huge returns to investors), big pharma ramps up drug prices on the back of knowledge monopolies (buying back their shares with the profits), multinational corporations hide ‘their’ intellectual property in offshore shell companies (avoiding much-needed taxes), and governments turn the air we breathe into a financial asset (giving it away to polluters). Contemporary capitalism is different; it is increasingly dominated by forms of rentiership rather than entrepreneurship, by the extraction of economic rents rather than the creation of new products and services (Birch 2017a; Felli 2014; Sayer 2015; Swyngedouw, 2010; Ward & Aalbers, 2016). Economic rents can be defined as the value extracted from economic activity – broadly conceived – as the result of the ownership and control of a particular resource, primarily because of that resource’s inherent or constructed degree of productivity, scarcity, or quality. As geographers, it is necessary to unpack how we analyse and understand – theoretically, politically, and ethically – the diversity of modes of ownership and control of resources in contemporary capitalism, including sociotechnical platforms (e.g. Uber), business model sorcery (e.g. Google), prosumer productivity (e.g. Facebook), Big Data mining (e.g. consumption patterns), and financial warlockery (e.g. interchange fees). This unpacking opens up opportunities to return to some of the geographical classics (e.g. David Harvey, Neil Smith) on economic rent, as well as engage with more recent literatures pushing forward debate in this area (e.g. Andreucci et al. 2017; Birch 2017b, 2017c; Haila 2016; Langley & Leyshon 2016; Maurer 2017; Schwartz 2017; Slater 2017; Storper 2013; Tretter 2016; Ward & Aalbers, 2016; Zeller 2008).