Financial geography has come of age: making space for intradisciplinary dialogue

ABSTRACT

The launch of Finance and Space heralds the maturation of financial geography as a geographical subdiscipline. Maturation comes with the responsibility to establish deeper dialogues across geography to achieve synthesis in big debates surrounding global challenges, science, technology, nature and society. We highlight three areas of intradisciplinary dialogic potential illustrating financial geography’s contribution to debates on (countering) run-away environmental degradation, (countering) the enclosure of life in digital platforms, and (countering) uneven development. These ventures, however, can only be successful amid a disciplinary culture of informed engaged pluralism, conceptual sobriety and critical deconstruction/reconstruction of financial sector discourse.

KEYWORDS:

• Financial geography
• engaged pluralism
• intradisciplinarity
• academic culture
• geographical imagination
• critical social science

JEL:

• B00
• N01
• Y80
• N20

1. INTRODUCTION

Publishing the inaugural volume of Finance and Space marks the coming of age for financial geography, a relatively young geographical subdiscipline that emerged in earnest in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Scholars did study geographies of money and finance for a long time before the GFC. These studies engaged with debates like the post-Bretton Woods resurgence of international financial centres, the 1980s third world debt crisis, capital and the built environment, and the growing centrality of finance in the global economy supported by the rapid advance of information and communication technologies (e.g., Corbridge et al., 1994; Harvey, 1985; Leyshon & Thrift, 1997; Warf, 1989). But the field was too sparse during this time to institutionalise as a geographical subdiscipline. With the GFC things suddenly changed. As existing geographical theorising generally fell short of explaining the intense financial interconnectedness of economies across the globe, a new generation of scholars, often personally affected by this crisis and often inspired by pre-GFC work on the geographies of money and finance, turned to theorising financial geography and processes of financialisation to understand the crisis (Gibadullina, 2021).

Looking back on this period of maturation, we sense that fifteen years of work in financial geography post-GFC means that the relative finance-blindness of (economic) geography from before the GFC (Engelen & Faulconbridge, 2009; Lee et al., 2009) has generally been alleviated. However, to the present student in the undergraduate classroom, most born post 9/11, the GFC is already ancient history. Their lives have been shaped by things like smartphones, climate anxiety, increasing inequalities, COVID-19 and the return of cold-war style geopolitics. To them, and in their curriculum, financial geography may be one flavour of geography among many others competing for their attention. Similarly, financial geographers and interdisciplinary heterodox finance scholars (Samman et al., 2023) now have to make their case alongside competing subdisciplines, including fresher siblings, for a limited number of faculty jobs and scarce research funding.

Being a mature subdiscipline with its own journal also means that financial geography has a newfound independence in how it relates to other subdisciplines. It no longer needs to make its case with, for instance, economic geographers for scarce space in their journals. But that newfound independence also brings newfound responsibility. Financial geography ought not to be satisfied with just having the opportunity to have a stable dialogue with like-minded scholars. Financial geography now also must share the burden to make the whole of geography more than the sum of its parts. As an interdisciplinary discipline (Baerwald, 2010), geography thrives when it can achieve a synthesis across thematic domains. To remain geography, it must be inoculated against the centrifugal tendencies of ever-increasing thematic specialisation leading to intellectual silos (Van Meeteren, 2023). In this commentary, we reflect on the potential, conditions and challenges for financial geography to drive geographical dialogue and synthesis.

Two disclaimers apply. One, by focusing on intradisciplinary dialogues, we bracket the discussion of how financial geography can contribute to interdisciplinary debates within heterodox financial studies that would benefit from including a geographical perspective (Lee, 2002). Here we will just remark that having a well-developed geographical sense of disciplinary place may be a prerequisite to being the ambassador of thinking geographically beyond geography, and venturing into heterodox economics, financial anthropology and sociology, history, critical accounting and other fields. Second, our commentary is instigated by our personal history as active members of the post-GFC financial geography community and is not an editorial statement setting out Finance and Space’s future policy. Our intentions are more modest. Reasoning from the discipline of geography, we wonder what place financial geography can occupy within the wider discipline, where the dialogic potential lies and what the preconditions for fruitful dialogue are.

2. DIALOGIC POTENTIAL

Where does financial geography have the potential to drive intradisciplinary dialogue within geography and change the conversation (Domosh, 2016)? As Aalbers (2015a) argues, financial geography is sometimes incorrectly seen as a subdiscipline that singularly evolved from economic geography. Indeed, before the GFC, financial logics and concepts did particularly thrive in urban geography, with David Harvey’s work being the formative influence in the 1970s and 1980s (Harvey, 1985), and in post-cultural turn human geography, where the influence of finance on changing subjectivities stood centre stage (e.g., Clark et al., 2004; McDowell, 2011). The prehistory of financial geography shows that driving the wider discussion about urban development and culture is perfectly within reach. The additional fields where financial geography could contribute to intradisciplinary dialogues is long and varied. For this contribution, we focus on three fields of interaction where financial geography instils the geographical imagination and that are theorised as pivotal for spatial transformations in our global society (Gong et al., 2022; Van Meeteren & Kleibert, 2022): run-away climate and environmental change, the accelerating digital enclosure of society and new patterns of global inequality amid geopolitical turmoil.

First, now that we are urgently running out of time to avoid climate and ecological disaster (IPCC, 2023), a key area entails the relation between society and nature. Here, a crucial dialogue needs to be established between financial geography and those in geography that study physical geographical processes, natural hazards and risk, climate change, biodegradation and the like (e.g., Hillier & Van Meeteren, 2023). The double materiality of finance requires relying on physical geographers to understand changing riskscapes, the crucial impact of global change on the valuation of financial assets and the role of environmental, social and governance (ESG) at the corporate level (Davies et al., 2020). But also vice versa, financial geography can show how finance’s calculative practices shape investment flows in actual places, and thereby inhibit or push material change in dialectic ways (Taylor & Aalbers, 2022). Fundamentally, finance is in the business of ‘futuring’ as it evaluates imaginable futures in terms of generating financial returns (Beckert, 2016). Interesting discussions are to be had to what extent private finance is capable of ‘futuring’ practices that will save the planet, or rather whether we need public finance anchored in long-term non-financial value systems to avert imminent disaster (Dörry & Schulz, 2018). What financial geography crucially illustrates is how institutionalised societal structures of short-term financial value embedded in financialised capitalism undercut human stewardship over a finite planet.

A second key area involves the relation between society and online/digital technology warranting a further engagement with those studying digital geographies (Ash et al., 2018). Financial geography is increasingly prolific in studying financial technology as part of a wider process of the platformisation and digital transformation of finance (Hendrikse et al., 2018; Langley & Leyshon, 2021; Trincado-Munoz et al., 2023). But there is a further debate to be had about the relations between platform finance and the wider platform economy, surveillance capitalism and the broader shift toward a platform society (Van Dijck et al., 2018). To what extent is finance affected by wider trends of platformisation and vice versa: how is the platformisation of economy and society – as mediated by online/digital platforms – driven by the interests of finance capital? Much is to be gained by engaging with digital geography to understand how finance is embedded in everyday lives of citizens as ‘users’, for instance through the gamification of finance (Lai & Langley, 2023). The geographical imagination is crucial to understand how virtual interactions are still anchored in material structures such as data centres (Amoore, 2018) and to what extent they remain mediated by corporations that own the digital infrastructure enabling new forms of rent extraction (Birch & Cochrane, 2022). Data now is a key resource mustered by large Tech corporations but has also a become a source of geopolitical strife between macro-regions vying for technological sovereignty (Bassens & Hendrikse, 2022). Thus, financial geography also has a contribution to make to political geography and vice versa (Lai et al., 2020).

A third key area entails uneven relations within global society. Finance plays a central role in (re)producing global uneven development and pre-existing colonial hierarchies (Alami et al., 2023; Bernards, 2022; Haag, 2023). The dialogue about the role of finance as a driver of uneven development but also how uneven development is embodied in the geographies of the global financial system requires further attention. There is the work of development geographers critical of the nexus between remittances, digital technology and financial inclusion (Guermond, 2022) and the study of subordinate financialisation that seeks to question how finance is instrumental in locking-in global peripheries (Bernards, 2022). The finance-development nexus needs scrutinising in terms of the processes of value extraction in place, but also needs to open up the plurality of financial systems that do not necessarily align with the key tenets of global financialised capitalism (Bassens et al., 2010). Another key question is how the seemingly global force of financial capital is spatially anchored. The intersections of finance and uneven development have historically been a key focus of world and global cities research (Parnreiter, 2019). Finance and its associated para-financial complex (Bassens et al., 2021) that orchestrates global value chains constitute an obligatory passage point (Pažitka et al., 2022) in global financial circuits. Consequently, financial centres are also places of value extraction from the wider economy (Bassens & Van Meeteren, 2015). The sometimes-parallel literatures on world city networks (Taylor & Derudder, 2016) and global financial networks (Coe et al., 2014; Haberly & Wójcik, 2022) provide conceptual maps and empirical strategies to ground these relationships between finance, the material and political economy, and the associated processes of uneven development.

3. DIALOGIC PRECONDITIONS

This short exposition shows how there are antecedents and prospects for financial geography to drive conversations with economic geographies, cultural geographies, urban geographies, digital geographies, political geographies, environmental geographies and (uneven) development geographies, and this is not intended as an exhaustive list. But such engagement will not be automatic and, as a mature subdiscipline, financial geography needs to remain literate to speak meaningfully and respectfully across these fields. To anchor that epistemological literacy, we believe financial geographers should remain mindful about the following three preconditions as they pursue their continued research agenda.

First, financial geographers need to safeguard their competence to traverse across the epistemological fractures that haunt geography. For instance, although financial geography and physical geography have great potential synergy, their epistemological evolution made them among the most diverged branches in geography. Financial geography has thrived on a poststructuralist epistemological soil (e.g., Fields, 2018; Santos, 2023) while physical geography maintained a strong positivist orientation (although see Lave et al., 2018). A flourishing intradisciplinary dialogue requires an engaged pluralism that acknowledges epistemological complementarity between perspectives and methodological curiosity across seemingly incommensurable divides (Van Meeteren et al., 2016). Financial geography, as a subdiscipline, needs to maintain sufficient methodological variety in its internal debates to collectively master the different epistemological languages it might encounter at its subdisciplinary boundaries.

Second, the question of language extends towards the vocabulary of financial geography itself. Here we see a need for continued ‘conceptual sobriety’ in terms of the dimensions and complexity of our conceptual apparatus. To lead intradisciplinary dialogue, financial geography needs to be able to explain its logics and contribution in a language understandable to other geographical subdisciplines. Within the financial sector, there is a tendency to stress the complexity of the field and of financial activities. This mystification (Christophers, 2009) is inherent in the business practice of finance, but it should be the practice of financial geographers to demystify this complexity to the wider world and not use it instrumentally to stress the distinctiveness of financial geography. The risk of this happening is compounded by two processes. The first is the inherent tendency when developing a new academic field, like financial geography, to conceive of a distinguishing vocabulary and in- and outgroup signifiers and distinctions (Frickel & Gross, 2005). Doing so helps foster a shared identity and collective sense of purpose for financial geographers necessary to muster the resources to reproduce and extend the field but at the detriment of stressing a difference with non-financial geographers. The second tendency is that finance is a quickly evolving social field and, especially with the recent re-articulation of finance with digital technology (Lai & Samers, 2021; Trincado-Munoz et al., 2023), there is a risk of getting so immersed in socio-technical detail that it is difficult to translate a fast-moving phenomenon to a wider audience. There is a fine balance between conceptually understanding the double whammy of financial and technological innovation while countering the discursive move to coin new concepts to invoke a sense of complexity. Financial geographers need to resist to present their work as more innovative than it actually is and acknowledge long-standing scholarly predecessors, as maintaining a dialogue across fields could be something preferable to adding another layer on an already oversaturated conceptual texture.

Third, and related, to co-produce more synthetic geographical knowledge, financial geographers need to be able to translate financial industry language appropriated through close dialogue (Clark, 1998) into a language comprehensible for non-financial geographers. This translation requires critical deconstruction of industry terms as well as their critical reconstruction to make them ready for use in a language that can also critically evaluate finance’s impact on society. Despite justified concerns about the chaotic character of a term like ‘financialisation’ (Christophers, 2015; Engelen, 2008), it has been very successful in driving synthetic knowledge production on the intersections of finance and society, while accounting for geographical diversity (Aalbers, 2015b). Furthermore, financialisation – through genus-type similarities with older geographical vocabularies around gentrification and neoliberalisation – has also proven to be powerful in organising the debate beyond financial geography. Having a conversation in contextually sensitive ways around such terms, moreover, allows us to critically evaluate industry discourse. Is digital finance a matter of achieving financial inclusion? Or is it a matter of the financialisation of everyday life? Other thought experiments could follow: what is sustainable finance really to sustain (Castree & Christophers, 2015)? Is it about financing a durable, caring and regenerative societal relation with the environment? Or is it about sustaining and derisking private finance (Gabor, 2023)? What is financial innovation? Is this actual ‘innovation’ or rather a veil to cover up acts of bricolage by powerful actors eager to take on irresponsible levels of risk (Engelen et al., 2010)? Critical deconstruction and reconstruction open the possibility for financial geography to be more ‘impactful’ by producing a language intelligible to those allies in policy, politics, NGOs and wider civil society to question the hegemonic frameworks of finance. With its plural identity and epistemological openness, the infant journal Finance and Space, we are convinced, will be a key space for a mature field of financial geography to stage these intradisciplinary dialogues.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This writing of this commentary was supported by FWO Research [grant No. G004920N].