No abstract

Advanced producer services firms and the highly skilled labour they employ are important indicators for world-city formation, as their activities allegedly grant cities the capabilities to exert command and control over global accumulation processes. To ‘stress test’ this central assumption of global city theory, we apply Burawoy’s extended case method to probe world-city formation in Beirut, Lebanon. Observing a tendency in the literature to superimpose distinctions between high- and low-skilled labour and between North and South, the study marshals a more plural conceptualization of ‘professionals’ to include expatriate or transnational Lebanese service workers. The study’s key finding is that Euro-American professionals play a relatively marginal role in Beirut’s human resource base, complicating North–South distinctions. By contrast, domestic and expat Beiruti professionals are far more crucial in manning circuits of value leading to and from the city. These professionals act as intermediaries in unlocking Gulf markets for clients, contribute to institutional change in their host countries and help build command and control functions elsewhere. Relatedly, Beirut has become susceptible to processes of ‘expatriate world-city formation’, where real estate development and the attraction of bank deposits are partly the result of these APS-professionals repatriating their management fees into Beirut’s built environment and Lebanon’s domestic banking sector. Witnessing the growth of Beirut's expatriate world-city functions in absence of financial centre redevelopment, the paper proposes to be sensitive to potential disconnects between the function and location of command and control in global cities more generally.

Financialization has become a new keyword to describe and analyze contemporary developments in economies and societies. It has also become a key concept in understanding recent trends in housing markets and policies. Since most scholarship that has initially studied these new trends was produced by scholars based in Europe, North America, and Australia and reflected on the dynamics of countries situated at the centers of the world economy, questions arose on the extent to which these trends could also be detected outside of these countries. The call for articles that originated this special issue was intended to collectively answer this question: Does the financialization of housing shape, and is it shaped by, housing policies and practices in countries situated at the peripheries of the global economy? The initial call for articles referred to these other territories and economies as the Global South. Although the term Global South is generally juxtaposed with the term Global North, which suggests a very strong binary, the idea was not to employ the term in this binary fashion. Rather, Global South was used as a shorthand or heuristic device to focus on countries other than Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States, or those of Europe. We also could have opted for terms like nonrich, poor, non-Western, Third World, developing, or underdeveloped countries. The denominations born of postwar decolonization processes, which are founded on the discourse in which Truman launched the Point 4 Program, divided the world into advanced, modern, and developed countries on one hand, and traditional, backward, and underdeveloped countries on the other. Development aid was thought to enable everyone to reach, at some point, the desired stage of a developed country. In the 1960s, multilateral agencies and central universities adopted a new epithet in the same direction: developing countries. But like the term Global South, these are all problematic terms. They all have links to specific modes of organizing the globe that, throughout modern history, very often produced a dualistic view of the world. Most recently, denominations follow each other in quick succession and compete: South, Global South, emerging economies. Classification systems produce and reproduce a representation of the world and of the positions occupied by different individuals, social groups, and collective actors, but also by territories. South-North and Global South-Global North classifications are highly indebted to the tradition of geographic regionalization, which is based on homogeneities. In reality, there are more complex constellations of countries. We do not intend to resolve such issues in this special issue. Instead, we would like to focus on the financialization of housing in countries located at the peripheries of the world economy, with the specific goal of rejecting binary thinking about financialization processes. A common critique in the financialization literature is that the concept is used to suggest that the same process takes pla...

No abstract

No abstract