Every year, delegations from across Britain and beyond pack their bags for the great property and investment festivals of the world; MIPIM in Cannes, Expo Real in Munich, and increasingly UKREiiF, Leeds’ own home-grown equivalent. These are modern pilgrimages of urban ambition: expensive gatherings where city leaders, developers and consultants compete for the attention of global financiers. The stands gleam, the receptions flow, and the language is always the same: ‘unlocking opportunity’, ’accelerating growth’, ’creating inclusive investment’.
Leeds itself has taken centre stage in this theatre of competition, proudly hosting UKREiiF as a mark of civic confidence. Yet the question remains whether these grand expos bring genuine renewal or simply replicate the rituals of an exhausted economic order. I wrote about this unease in The Minerva Tale, a satire asking whether a city that prays to investment gods abroad might be forgetting the living communities at home who keep its heart beating.
The living economy of belonging
After years of austerity, cuts and fiscal constraint, it is easy to see why inward investment feels like the only game in town. But in chasing global capital, local authorities forget the quieter, humbler forms of investment that already sustain them. The same councils that spend heavily on international promotion often struggle to offer modest support to the small firms, social enterprises and microbusinesses that give their cities character, vitality, and resilience. And sometimes these policies seem to actively harm them.
These local enterprises do not attend MIPIM, Expo Real or UKREiiF. They wouldn’t pay the airfare, the hotel or the stand space even if they could afford it. Yet they are the living economy of the city, the very community of belonging; the baker who employs two apprentices; the café that hosts the local writers’ group; the upholsterer sharing a workshop with a goldsmith; the voluntary group running a repair café in a disused industrial unit.
Such ventures rarely generate headlines or speculative finance, but they represent something far more enduring: commitment to place. They keep wealth circulating locally and create what Ivan Illich called “seedbeds of virtue and friendship”, spaces where hospitality, patience and trust are still practised.
When policymakers prioritise inward investment above local enterprise, they adopt a consequentialist ethic: if the outcome (jobs, growth, prestige) is good, then the means are justified. But the ethic of care asks different questions: who benefits? Who bears the cost? Who is forgotten? From that perspective, our development strategies begin to look ethically incoherent.
The sameness of ’uniqueness’
Every city claims to be unique. Yet the language of ’creative hubs’, ’innovation districts’ and ’mixed-use developments’ is the same from Munich to Manchester, from Leeds to Lisbon. The result is a global monoculture of urban ambition, with each city striving to look investable, and therefore each looking much the same.
The rise of the entrepreneurial city encouraged local authorities to transform from public caretakers into marketeers of place. Their success is measured not by citizens’ wellbeing but by the size of property portfolios and the footfall of investors at real estate expos.
In the process, civic imagination is narrowed to whatever belongs in an investment prospectus. Public space becomes ’development opportunity’. Culture becomes ’place-making’. Even care – for people, for heritage, for nature – is only justified by a financial ’return’.
From culture to civilisation
Oswald Spengler, writing between the two World Wars, warned of this kind of decay. In The Decline of the West, he described how living cultures which begin with the peasant, the soil, and the sacred bond of place, inevitably harden into civilisations. What was once organic becomes mechanical. Energy gives way to form; creation gives way to documentation. Civilisations, he argued, continue to build, but can no longer create. They produce archives, not art; memorials, not meaning.
In Spengler’s cycle, vitality is slowly replaced by what Deleuze might call simulacra: imitations of life that no longer carry life within them. Cities speak of ’innovation’, but the word becomes hollow, a ritual incantation of policy rather than a lived practice. This same process plays out in urban policy: once-living economies of place are displaced by glossy masterplans and memoranda of understanding. We preserve the image of dynamism while losing the substance of it.
Learning from the places that still ‘live’
There are, however, places that resist this drift. Hebden Bridge has managed to retain a culture and economy that still hum with life; an imperfect ecology of independent traders, artists and co-operatives woven together through shared care in the valley that holds them. Its identity is not a brand, it’s a relationship between past and present, craft and creativity, land and people.
Todmorden shows a similar instinct for self-renewal: its Incredible Edible movement and community-owned ventures have turned the idea of investment on its head, rooting prosperity in soil, food, and friendship. Whitby balances tourism with tradition, sustaining its history while welcoming visitors drawn by the town’s rooted character.
These are not ’models’ to be copied, but reminders that economic vitality emerges from difference, not conformity; from care, not competition. They show that the future belongs not to those who shout loudest at MIPIM, Expo Real or UKREiiF, but to those who listen most deeply.
If we truly want a renaissance, it will not happen in convention centres abroad, or in exhibition halls in Leeds, but in the quiet renewal of the local: in the craftspeople, cafés, workshops and co-ops that keep the civic heart beating. The lesson from places like Hebden Bridge is simple but profound: that belonging, not branding, is the soil in which prosperity grows.
Until we learn to invest in those who already invest their lives here, we will continue selling the soul of our cities for the illusion of prosperity.
