Resumen de Utrecht University Urban and Regional Research Centre Utrecht (URU) Faculty of Geosciences Utrecht: The Case of Sihlcity in Zurich

Thierry Theurillat, Olivier Crevoisier

• Financialization and sustainable urban planning are now two major components ofurban production and landscape change in Western cities. The purpose of this article isto demonstrate how the intervention of financial actors influences urban sustainability inthe building of megaprojects, by developing a conceptual framework for analysis andinterpretation. This framework aims first to examine the way in which sustainability hasbeen produced by the different actors involved in a real-life situation, and then to placethese interactions in their institutional, spatial and temporal context. Consequently,sustainability is understood as a social construct which is the object of negotiations thathave led to the making of institutional arrangements in order to allow the project to becarried through. This framework has been constructed from the financial geography andurban geography literature on ‘finance, the city and sustainability’and from a case study.The latter looks at the regeneration of a brownfield site to create a shopping and leisurecomplex that was the biggest in Switzerland and was purchased by financial actors.