Dr Callum Ward
Management School
Lecturer in Valuation and Governance
+44 114 222 3441
Full contact details
Management School
C100
Western Bank Villa
300-302 Western Bank
Sheffield
S10 2TN
- Profile
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Callum undertook a PhD in Geography at KU Leuven, Belgium, as a Flemish Research Foundation Fellow, on the the political economy of land rent and real estate financing. Upon completing his PhD, Callum joined York University, Canada, as a Fellow in Innovation and Rentiership investigating assetisation in the digital economy.
In 2019 Callum joined the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London. He was the research fellow on the ORA-ERC project 'What is Governed in Cities' (WHIG) led by Prof Mike Raco in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam and Sciences Po Paris. He subsequently worked as a Research Fellow in the Department of Geography and Environment, LSE (2021-22), and the Institute for Housing and Urban Research, Uppsala University (2022-24).
In 2024 Callum joined CRAFiC at Sheffield University Management School, where he continue to pursue an agenda utilising corporate research methods to offer insight on debates in land economy, asset formation, and issues of governance.
- Research interests
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Callum uses corporate research methods to contribute to debates in economic and urban geography. Much of his work has focused on financing and governance in land development, but within a broader agenda interested on the reconfiguration of state-market relations and their mediation by asset forms. As such, his research elaborates on issues of accountability in the housing market, as well as the evolving nature of governance more generally.
- Publications
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Journal articles
- Local state financialisation: future research directions for an emergent conjuncture. Finance and Space, 1(1), 318-339.
- Political Economy in Housing Studies: Geography or History?. Housing, Theory and Society, 41(1), 42-46.
- How to Make a City into a Firetrap: Relations of Land and Property in the
UK 's Cladding Scandal. Antipode, 56(1), 353-373.
- Struggling over new asset geographies. Dialogues in Human Geography, 14(1), 47-50.
- Assetization and the ‘new asset geographies’. Dialogues in Human Geography, 14(1), 9-29.
- Introduction: Critical approaches to rentiership. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 55(6), 1429-1437.
- The political economy of land value capture in the UK: Rent and viability in Salford’s new municipalist turn. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 55(6), 1600-1617.
- State capitalism, capitalist statism: Sovereign wealth funds and the geopolitics of London’s real estate market. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 55(3), 742-759.
- Anticipating demand shocks: Patient capital and the supply of housing. European Urban and Regional Studies, 30(1), 50-65.
- Towards a virtual statecraft: Housing targets and the governance of urban housing markets. Progress in Planning, 166, 100655-100655.
- Introduction. Competition & Change, 26(3-4), 407-414.
- Land financialisation, planning informalisation and gentrification as statecraft in Antwerp. Urban Studies, 59(9), 1837-1854.
- Data as asset? The measurement, governance, and valuation of digital personal data by Big Tech. Big Data & Society, 8(1), 205395172110173-205395172110173.
- The annihilation of time by space in the COVID-19 pandemic downturn. Dialogues in Human Geography, 10(2), 191-194.
- Neoliberal Europeanisation, Variegated Financialisation: Common but Divergent Economic Trajectories in the Netherlands, United Kingdom and Germany. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 110(2), 123-137.
- Neoliberalisation from the Ground Up: Insurgent Capital, Regional Struggle, and the Assetisation of Land. Antipode, 50(4), 1077-1097.
- Virtual special issue editorial essay: ‘The shitty rent business’: What’s the point of land rent theory?. Urban Studies, 53(9), 1760-1783.
- Contradictions of Financial Capital Switching: Reading the Corporate Leverage Crisis through The Port of Liverpool's Whole Business Securitization. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.
- Returning to the radical analysis of rent. Radical Housing Journal, 1(2), 207-210.
Chapters
- Land as an Asset, The Political Economy of Land (pp. 40-55). Routledge
- Local state financialisation: future research directions for an emergent conjuncture. Finance and Space, 1(1), 318-339.
- Teaching interests
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At the heart of Callum's teaching is the principle of 'constructive alignment'. This means that students learn through practical application of knowledge, so what they do and how it is assessed must be closely aligned with the skills they need to succeed at university and in further employment. This entails a variety of strategies aimed at activating students and fostering a vibrant learning community, including student-led case studies, self-guided fieldtrips, roleplay debates in the classroom, and use of multimedia sources in the online learning environment.
Callum has taught at KU Leuven, University College London, London School of Economics and Political Science, and Uppsala University. He attained a Post-Graduate Certificate in Higher Education from the LSE in 2022. In 2021, won the university-wide teaching award LSESU Award for Personal and Professional Development based on student nominations.
- Professional activities and memberships
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Early Career and Digital Media Editor for Finance and Space
- PhD Supervision
- Land
- Housing
- Urban regeneration
- Real estate
- Assetisation
- Wealth chains