LAUSR

Abstract In highly internationalised cities, real estate developers must learn to negotiate global-local tensions to territoralise their work and secure planning permission. This paper examines how they do this and positions itself at the meeting point of research on policy mobility and real estate. Developers have been shown to be co-coordinators of development processes, and one of many agents who facilitate the global flow and production of urban spaces and ideas. In these endeavours local knowledge is important, yet developers remain interested in sites beyond their home city. This paper questions what strategies developers utilise to become co-ordinating forces in new cities, a pertinent issue because increasingly urban actors position themselves as ‘global’ or beyond a geographically circumscribed space. Based on 60 interviews across London’s Royal Docks and Johannesburg’s Modderfontein, this paper argues that to work in a new location, developers and their consultants must utilise local knowledge, highlighting three specific strategies: (1) on-boarding local political actors; (2) hiring individuals who primarily work in the city and (3) becoming part of ‘the club’. These illustrate the ways developers localise themselves, ‘learning to play the game’, and evidence the consequences for where and how urban politics happens. Ultimately, this paper argues that at the heart of internationalised urban environments there are transnational networks which are becoming sites of urban politics where assemblages of actors are formed that make the global movement of urban ideas possible.