The office is dead, long live the office: Performing commercial property markets and urban financialisation in small but global European financial centres

Abstract

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; Hesse and Rafferty 2020), with a specific focus on the performance of commercial property markets and office development. The paper unpicks how real estate services firms use particular types of urban data to narrate, imagine, and seek to shape financial investment and property development in European financial centres, with a particular focus on commercial real estate and office developments. Drawing from work on performativity and particularly its use in social studies of finance (Froud 2006; MacKenzie 2008b; 2008a), the paper uses Luxembourg and Dublin to make two main arguments. Firstly, commercial real estate investment is subject to and narrated by a wide body of corporate “reportage” research, which periodically employs a set of discursive techniques that seek to produce and disseminate specific forms of knowledge (and ignorance – see Slater (2021)), with the aim of guiding investment, making real estate markets, and shaping urban governance. Secondly and relatedly, the paper argues that urban property developers and real estate agents play an active role in performing commercial property markets at the intersection of the local/global. The urban built environment has been usefully understood as shaped by transcalar territorial networks (Halbert and Rouanet 2014), and subject to the mobilisation and enrolment of investors, real estate developers, state actors, expertise, and narratives around urban space as a financial asset (e.g. Brill and Özogul 2021; Robinson and Attuyer 2020). Against this “networked” backdrop, the paper attunes to the generative role of commercial property reportage as a central component of how property markets are performed, and the wider and uneven nature of urban financialisation that this creates.