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This article explores the potential to mobilize in an urban context the key insights ofthe burgeoning literature on the performativity of economics. It argues that ourunderstanding of contemporary urban political-economic transformation needs toexplicitly recognize the active role of economics in making and remaking the urbanworld, as opposed to merely describing and analysing it in some kind of passive,detached fashion. It develops this argument through the elaboration of a case study ofjust such world-making in action: the growing use in the United Kingdom, since the early2000s, of economic models for assessing the viability of affordable housing provision innew residential developments. The world of urban redevelopment that such modelsattempt to describe formulaically has, the article submits, increasingly come to actaccording to the model and the assumptions it contains; the model, in this sense, hasbeen progressively actualized in the urban landscape. The article conceptualizes suchperformative economic models as examples of what Michel Callon calls economics ‘inthe wild’, and it focuses on the work of the leading commercial developer and marketerof such models in the affordable housing planning environment over the last decade —a consulting company called Three Dragons.
