From land assets to environmental services: the imagined financialised futures of public parks in the UK

Keywords: urban nature, urban parks, financialisation, austerity, local government
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 48

Abstract

In this paper, I examine recent attempts by local governments and environmental charities to imagine new financialised funding streams for urban parks in the United Kingdom. As non-statutory services, urban parks across the UK have experienced unprecedented levels of budget cuts in the decade of austerity that followed the 2008 financial crisis. Those materialised in park closures and sales and the pausing of horticultural and ecological management. To counter this dynamic, park services have implemented new volunteer management practices, set up charitable trusts and foundations, and introduced commercial revenue-generation streams.
More surprisingly perhaps, they were also advised by large environmental charities to deploy new financial instruments. In this paper, I focus on endowments and green bonds to unpack the way they reimagine what parks are (for). Initial projects often included the generation and management of an endowment, through which land itself was seen as a key, if passive, asset from which to fructify income. More recent attempts to set up green bonds, by contrast, are predicated on a view of parks as active ecological entities, capable of attracting green finance and offering a return on investment in the form of beneficiary agencies paying for the ‘services’ they receive from urban ecosystems. By focusing on two examples, I discuss how the necessity to identify repaying agencies restricts how the work that urban ecologies can do is imagined. I finally argue that the past decade of austerity has further led to the domestication and sanitisation of urban ecological imaginaries within local government.