Budd Leslie, Whimster Sam (Editors). Global Finance and Urban Living: A Study of Metropolitan Change

Published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library. 2005. ISBN : 0-203-97709-2 (Master e-book ISBN). (384 pages). Series : The International library of sociology. Founded by Karl Mannheim. Editor: John Urry.
Subjects : International finance. International finance-Social aspects. City and town life. Urban economics. Central business districts.
Growth and dynamics of financial markets - Patterns of culture, space and work.Any journey starts with the first step and any conversation with the first word. But purpose and meaning do depend on context. This work stemmed from our immediate experience as teachers and researchers within the environs of the City of London. Journeys into and across this global financial centre generated manifold conversations. As academic flâneurs we try hard to integrate these impressions with a knowledgeable analysis of the abstract forces of global finance. Yet repeatedly the scale and unpredictability of events in the 1980s have defied any one authoritative explanation. The seemingly irresistible rise of the financial services sector and an associated inflation in financial assets have turned widely based city economies into service mono-economies and their central business districts into massive construction sites, and in the process disrupted city residents’ sense of their place in the urban environment.
In Part I we point out that the financial apex of material and economic life is now not only a global phenomenon but that its influence has penetrated to the level of individuals and households. In Part II the essays reveal a repatterning of personality, lifestyle, neighbourhoods and the metropolis. This process can be thought of as a break-up of old hierarchies, disciplines and boundaries in the face of the dissolving properties of global finance, which has allowed a new series of repatterning. These arguments are part of a wider debate concerning the issue of globalisation. This holds that we have to reconstitute our way of thinking in terms of hierarchies: not a simple ascension from the level of the individual to that of household, neighbourhood, city, nation, and the international, but instead the international becomes global and, as such, intrudes into all levels of life. The metropolis is contained to a diminishing degree within a national setting; its economic flows are less exclusively city-wide or national and its neighbourhoods can no longer claim an homogeneity of class or race. In Roland Robertson’s formulation we are witnessing the interpenetration of the local by the global and the global by the local (Robertson 1991). Part I takes up this theme in its economic aspect, Part II in its cultural and sociological aspects.