In “Arrive and retreat: London’s ultra-prime apartment blocks as dark urban renaissance” published in City, Rowland and his colleague Martha Mingay discuss how the expansion of an archipelago of residential blocks across London’s West End has created an urban renaissance of sorts, but it is a rebirth that has targeted the expanded ranks of the global super-rich, yielding a visibly luxurious, often vacant residential remaking, rather than the aspirations for a diverse, vibrant and open urbanism envisaged some years ago for the city. New luxury apartment blocks offer high levels of privacy, security and the seamless integration of bodies and vehicles into underground or enclosed entry points. These ‘ultraland’ blocks are less places of conviviality and encounter, offering instead a kind of dark space urbanism that facilitates a partial social engagement with local environs by barely present owners. Combining an analysis of the planning applications for these developments with extensive street observation in London’s West End they discuss the social and spatial integration of these developments. They argue that a key effect is one of social ‘reduction’—the sense of null spaces that absorb bodies, furnishings and cars in ways that are the antithesis of earlier ambitions for socially vital and democratic urban spaces. They discuss the significance of these changes for contemporary life in the city more broadly.
In the second publication “Applying the global wealth chain typology to property purchases in the Liverpool and Merseyside Area” in Environment and Planning A, Rowland and his colleagues Rex McKenzie and Andrea Ingianni, explain how the wealth chain is a conceptualisation of extended flows of capital operating across multiple tax jurisdictions in order to extract maximum value from investment locations. To date, such chains have largely been considered in relation to either international tax-avoiding flows of capital to offshore havens or in relation to prime property markets in major metropoles. In this article, they use new data to explain the geographical variations in asset strategies and investment types associated with different types of wealth chain in a historically deprived city region. The data relate to the purchase of real estate in the Liverpool and Merseyside Area (LMA) of the UK by companies from offshore jurisdictions. They use data to empirically model the wealth-chain concept. They compare the results from our empirically derived model with the key theoretical propositions regarding such chains. Their results confirm the actions of identifiable types of wealth chain. By geographical distribution, the specific asset strategy that dominates suggests that wealth-chain offshore investors in Liverpool’s real estate are primarily motivated by their desire to protect their identities and their assets. In the literature on the subject, these are much sought after attributes of money launderers and others involved in illicit wealth accumulation. In money terms, the dominant asset strategy is situated in a much smaller geographical space in and around the city centre. In the literature, this type of wealth chain is associated with the multinational corporations who are, theoretically, the main source of innovation in wealth-chain operations.