The Relational Urban Geographies of Re/insurance
Florida Hurricane Wind Risk and the Making of Singapore’s Catastrophe Finance Hub
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Abstract
Re/insurance plays a multifaceted and increasingly powerful role in the expansion of financialised forms of climate risk governance. While re/insurance markets are global(-ising), they are also geographically uneven, contingent, and provisional. This chapter reflects on this tension by examining how catastrophe capital markets evolve through relational interplays within and between key urban geographies. Contemporary efforts to construct an insurance-linked securities (ILS) hub in Singapore using Florida insured hurricane wind risks provide a touchstone for the analysis. The chapter makes two contributions to critical insurance studies. First, the Florida-Singapore ILS case furthers our understanding of the constitutive relationships between re/insurance markets and specific urban geographical sites and practices, and shifting political and economic agendas and ecological risks therein. The chapter, therefore, aims to advance relational understandings of re/insurance geographies that incorporate both inter- and intra-market factors within critical accounts of industry transformation. Second, three analytical focal points – circulations of tools and techniques, risk capital flows, and shifting state engagement – are drawn from the case to further the relational study of changing reinsurance geographies.