The growing pains of growth machines: Topologies and topographies of urban financialisation in small-but-global European Financial Centres

Abstract

Building from Massey’s seminal work on globalisation and the complex entanglement and co-production of the local/global, research at the intersection of economic geography and “urban studies” has continued to unpack this entanglement and its implications for “global city research”. The ensuing de- and re-composition of urban theorising has been carried out alongside and draws from work on financialisation and financial geographies, which has tended to connect globalisation and financialisation processes to a “networked” (Derudder & Taylor, 2020; Pažitka et al., 2021) or “archipelagic” (Bassens & van Meeteren, 2014). This paper extends work on urban, economic, and financial geographies by offering a conjunctural reading of Luxembourg and Dublin as small-but-global financial centres (drawing from Hesse, 2016, and Hesse & Rafferty, 2020), with a focus on the urban built environment and its production. More specifically, I focus on commercial property developments, and particularly these cities’ urban office markets, as useful sites from which to “read” wider processes of globalisation, financialisation, and urbanisation. I argue that both cities play a somewhat atypical role in wider discussion of international financial centres, and that this is partly shaped by the topologies and topographies of how the states in which they are situated respond to wider global and financial processes. This makes them particularly interesting settings in which to analyse and compare how processes of globalisation and financialisation shape and respond to the urban built environment, with significant consequences for the local, national, and global stakeholders who interact within this. The paper uses commercial real estate development as a useful lens for understanding the active but uneven role that the state, planners, developers, investors, and residents play in producing the urban built environment, and suggests that this is particularly interesting in international financial centres, where use and exchange values are produced through local/global and financialised interactions. In doing so, I use Luxembourg and Dublin to highlight the state’s role in “boosting” (Logan & Molotch, 2007) and “respond[ing] to the needs of capital in historically and geographically contingent ways” (Weber, 2003), with a particular focus on the conflict between use and exchange values of urban space and accompanying pains of “international financial centre”/”urban growth machine” politics.