The entwined futures of financialisation and cities

This article considers the future of financialisation as it is entwined with that of cities. It poses the question of how cities can regulate financialisation. ‘Financialization’ is understood here to encompass the myriad of social, economic, legal and political dimensions of the transition from industrial capitalism to finance capitalism. This transition implicates the financial sector and their motives as well as the new roles that financial ideas play in everyday lives. That new role for finance has been understood to be a ‘normative order of reason’ that informs public decision-making and governance. While the efforts of national and transnational law to regulate the financial sector have been studied, there has been far less focus on local governments. Local governments, however, play a crucial role in how financial capitalism takes hold through their regulation of real estate and urban space (real estate being a key current engine of financial markets). Local governments mediate the ways that finance takes hold in cities and the built environment and the way that those transformations exclude certain populations. In short, they mediate the ‘spatialization’ of finance. This triangular constitution of local governance, financialisation and urban space can be observed in the shrinking of public space. The article first examines the relationship between public space and democracy, and the role of law as the underlying structure that allocates urban space towards the use of the public or the use of private real estate actors. This engagement demonstrates how urban space is a key site of financialisation’s dual dimensionality: as a sector with material accumulation of resources and as a constellation of rationalities and cultures. The article then turns to a discussion of city efforts to regulate the financial sector, and popular resistance to the ideologies of finance. Through that examination, this article hopes to demonstrate that efforts to regulate the financial sector are only one level on which to regulate financialisation. ‘Regulation’ here becomes a complex endeavour, requiring an engagement with the modes of reasoning and culture promulgated by financialisation as well as the financial sector and its activities.