The making of urban financialization? An exploration of brazilian urban partnership operations with building certificates

- We situate the debate on financialization of urban planning and land use in Brazil.
- We analyse securitized building certificates used in large urban development projects.
- Our findings show a still limited penetration of financial logics in urban planning.
- Recent evidence suggests that this might well change, however.
- Regulatory rollout and new foreign investors indicate an open-ended process.

This paper provides two contributions to the research on urban planning and the financialization of land use. Instead of stressing the consequences of finance on others, it prioritizes the analysis of the social-technical constitution of finance itself within urban planning, and does so in an emerging country setting, which is still relatively understudied in the existing literature. We analyse a specific Brazilian planning instrument, i.e., the sale of securitized building certificates (CEPACs) in large urban (re)development projects (UDPs), as a potential constituent space of urban financialization. The paper explores how planners, financial consultants, contractors and builders/developers effectively shape the contradictory financial and physical design and implementation of UDPs with CEPACs. Although the initial evidence shows that there are still clear limits to the penetration of financial logics into land use planning, continuing regulatory rollout and the increasing activism of foreign investors suggest the instrument's open-ended trajectory, with a potentially more significant role for financial actors in constituting urban financialization through CEPACs.