Conclusion. City's social futures

Drawing insights from the nine global case studies, we explore how to start thinking about creating conditions for a new politics of land and value. The co-constitutive relation between practice and concept around land value, as shown in the chapters, points to the fact that the monetary treatment of land as a source of money, while hegemonic, is an intentional choice and political outcome. To address the problematic market capture of land value, we need a qualitatively and paradigmatically different mode of thinking and practice around land and value. This is a shift that aims to re-embed land’s social life in land use practices, pluralize value logics, prioritize experimental and alternative practices, recast land value capture as a practice of participatory democracy, and focus on redistributive justice. Revisiting the idea that value is a mode of practice, we explore how to engage practices at key value moments – value transformation, value contestation, value negotiation, value capture, and value creation – to produce a new politics of land development that is generative of transforming cities toward a more socially desirable and just urban future.