Publications
Rebooting Amsterdam for the age of Big Tech: Platform capitalism, reintermediation, and financial-center change Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Re/Building Brussels. The construction sector and the production of urban space, from 1695 until today Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Asserting Europe's technological sovereignty amid American platform finance Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Spearheaded by major technology companies (Big Tech), digital platforms have rapidly become key infrastructures for accumulation under global financialized capitalism, with consumer convenience and underlying practices of data collection, control and analysis giving rise to platform finance. While financial institutions are partnering with financial technology (FinTech) start-ups to digitally enclose customers, American and Chinese Big Techs ...
The advanced producer services complex as an obligatory passage point: Evidence from rent extraction by investment banks Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Advanced producer services have long been theorized as pivotal in organizing the global economy. Finance takes centre stage in the advanced producer services complex as orchestrator of global flows, particularly in underwriting investment and evaluating corporate performance. The ascent of financialized globalization raises the suspicion that key advanced producer services act as rent-extracting ‘obligatory passage points’ in the ...
Unpacking the advanced producer services complex in world cities Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Limited empirical evidence in support of world-city formation has been the ‘dirty little secret’ of the eponymous research area. Since the late 1990s, inspired by Sassen’s account of The Global City, the field focused on advanced producer services (APS) firms as primary actors in world-city formation. While generating robust insights into the shifting geographies of world cities, empirical attention has mostly focused on mapping inter-urban ...
The Extended Local State under Financialized Capitalism Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Metropolitan Geographies of Advanced Producer Services: Centrality and Concentration in Brussels Vrije Universiteit Brussel
The literature on global and world cities points towards a growing concentration of advanced producer services (APS) firms in a restricted number of cities, who execute strategic command and control functions over globalised capitalism. However, relatively little attention has been paid to how APS are located within such cities. We argue that APS locations within cities are related to two partly independent processes: localisation economies ...
Placing cities in the circular economy: neoliberal urbanism or spaces of socio-ecological transition? Vrije Universiteit Brussel
The last decade has seen the adoption of the imaginary of a circular economy (CE) by cities. To date, much of the debate has been technical in orientation, making that the implications of the CE for urban theory and praxis have hitherto not been explored in great depth. ThisDebates and Interventions contribution collects work from diverse disciplinary quarters and geographical contexts, documenting the CE as an emerging alternative space of ...
Circular economy and the city Vrije Universiteit Brussel
The circular economy (CE) has become a matter of urban development. A literature review shows that the CE debate is biased toward technology-driven industrial change, while bracketing broader socio-political interests. We address this gap by exploring the political economy of scale of the CE. Looking into the case of Brussels (Belgium), a city that has recently adopted the CE as part of its socio-economic strategy, we explore how the ...