A new economic geography of finance is emerging, and the current "financialization" of contemporary economies has contributed greatly to the reshaping of the economic landscape. How can these changes be understood and interpreted, especially from a territorial point of view? There are two contradictory economic theories regarding the tangible effects of the rise of the finance industry. According to neoclassical financial theorists, the finance industry's success is based on its positive effects on the real economy through its capacity to allocate financial resources efficiently. An alternative approach, adopted here, posits that finance does not merely mirror the real economy and that the financial economy, far from being a simple instrument for the allocation of capital, has its own autonomy, its own logic of development and expansion. A series of complex, and sometimes contradictory, connections link financial markets and the real economy, and there are some tensions between them, calling into question the coherence of the regional and national economies that follow from them. Moreover, the territorial approach shows how the mobility/liquidity of capital and the changing dimensions of new regions and countries are central to the finance industry's functioning. This article builds an understanding of the financial system through the lens of pension funds and highlights the impact of such a system on the real economy and its geography. , , , ,
Financialization and sustainable urban planning are now two major components of urban production and landscape change in Western cities. On the one hand, urban propertyand more specifically major urban projects or megaprojects such as, for example, business districts, airports, sports stadiums or even urban network infrastructures -is increasingly owned by financial actors. On the other hand, these urban megaprojects have a significant impact on the organization of urban functions and city planning, which lean increasingly towards the precepts of sustainable development.The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how the intervention of financial actors influences urban sustainability in the building of a megaproject. Within the framework of an institutionalist and territorial approach to the economy (Colletis-Wahl et al., 2008;Crevoisier, 2010), this article develops an analytical framework that allows us to grasp the relationships between finance and sustainability in the urban production process. To be more precise, this framework aims first to examine the way in which sustainability has been produced by the different actors involved in a real-life situation, and then to place these interactions in their institutional, spatial and temporal context. Over the course of the different phases of one project, the actors constructed formal and informal institutional arrangements (Hodgson, 2006), reflecting issues that are financial and at the
. Emails: thierry.theurillat@unine.ch and olivier.crevoisier@unine.ch THEURILLAT T. and CREVOISIER O. Sustainability and the anchoring of capital: negotiations surrounding two major urban projects in Switzerland, Regional Studies. This article deals with the anchoring of mobile financial capital in the city and urban sustainability. Illustrated by a case study in the Swiss context, it develops the theory that new forms of negotiation are appearing around urban projects. Development/construction firms are playing a central role: they are capable of evaluating and translating the multiple dimensions of a project and certain sustainability challenges into financial terms, in a way that permits the anchoring of capital in the city. In parallel, the issue of sustainability depends greatly on the capacity of the local actors to negotiate with the promoters of urban projects. FinancializationUrban
This commentary article proposes three ideal types of ‘anchoring of finance capital into the city’, i.e. the way in which capital, as it is valued in financial markets, is transformed into real capital and vice versa. Some contexts will allow market finance s visions of the city to become reality without great alteration, and this produces the ‘financialised city’. In this case, the value of the city corresponds to trading on the financial markets and largely depends on the financial operators’ comparative and mimetic criteria. Second, the ‘entrepreneurial city’ corresponds to a tangible and localised vision of the city, outside the trading rooms. This requires interactions between intermediary and allied actors so that urban value can be translated into real profits and tangible urban objectives while mobilising market finance. Third, some contexts may promote debate, the creation of interdependencies and the genesis of multiple externalities, particularly around major urban development projects. This is what we call the ‘negotiated city’. Here, urban value depends much more directly, and more exclusively, on more or less complementary interactions between local and non-local actors, users, consumers, public actors, tourists, etc.
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