“World cities under conditions of financialized globalization: towards an augmented world city hypothesis”

Abstract

This paper interrogates the enduring, yet changing role of world cities as centers of capitalist command and control amidst deepening uneven development. By incorporating financialization processes in Friedmann's (1986) world city hypothesis, we hypothesize that the world city archipelago remains an obligatory passage point for the relatively assured realization of capital. The advanced producer services complex appropriates superprofits as producers of coconstitutive knowledge on operational and financial firm restructuring, the creation of new circuits of value, and capital switching. Geographically, beyond the International Financial Center shortlist, the wider world city archipelago inserts finance capital (logics) in contemporary economies and societies.

Neoliberal Europeanisation, Variegated Financialisation: Common but Divergent Economic Trajectories in the Netherlands, United Kingdom and Germany

“…The size of the UK’s banking sector – with assets over twice that of households and more than 10 times that of government – is due to the City of London’s successful entrenchment as a leading global financial centre and provider of advanced producer services (Bassens & van Meeteren ). That in mind, the explosive growth of financial derivatives is not strictly a feature of the UK economy but of the expanding global financial markets which London and its banks host (see Christophers ).…”

World Cities and the Uneven Geographies of Financialization: Unveiling Stratification and Hierarchy in the World City Archipelago

“…Global accountants and other advanced producer services (APS) firms, whose corporate geographies form the empirical heart of the world cities research agenda (Taylor and Derudder, ), are fundamentally implicated in the production of increasingly complex financial solutions for transnational corporations (TNCs) seeking to please shareholders under the intense gaze of global financial markets (Froud et al ., ; Palan et al ., ; Wójcik, ; Coe et al ., ). Hence, world cities become ‘obligatory passage points' under financialized globalization (Bassens and van Meeteren, Allen, ). As realization of ‘normal profits' is increasingly difficult in conditions of over‐accumulation, TNCs become dependent on the expertise of financial intermediaries (e.g.…”

“…investment banks) and auxiliary business services (accountants, law firms, management consultants, etc.) undertaking fee‐based work (Bassens and van Meeteren, ). Therefore, as well as facilitating ‘classic' globalization strategies of reorganizing global production networks (Friedmann, ; Castells, ; Parnreiter, ), servicing the offshore world and enabling regulatory arbitrage represents the veiled ‘dark side' of world cities and their APS complexes (Wójcik, ; ).…”

Pervasive but Neglected: Conceptualising Services and Global Production Networks

“…Further research on the enabling and benefiting services providers in regions could expand the scope of research on services and bring into focus the still largely blurred vision at the boundaries of GPNs. In line with recent work on financial services as intermediaries Dörry 2016), the real-estate sector is an interesting candidate for GPN research, especially given its vital role for capital switching and rent generation in cities (Bassens and van Meeteren 2015;Kleibert 2015a). A research agenda on services and GPNs thus could also provide an important point of intersection with the urban studies literature to refine our understanding of regional, local, and urban development opportunities.…”