Publications
Financial geography has come of age: making space for intradisciplinary dialogue Vrije Universiteit Brussel
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
Collective cultural infrastructures: ownership, architecture, governance 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 ...
Resistance is in the air: From post-politics to the politics of expertise Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Knowledge about air pollution is key, both to contest the status quo and to propose a different environmental imaginary as to how urban reality should be. Empirically, this paper focuses on Brussels and its history of air pollution contestation over the last fifty years, in order to trace how knowledge dynamics shape the politics of air. Theoretically, the paper offers a critical reading of the ‘post-political city’ literature that has been ...
De Essentiële Economie Vrije Universiteit Brussel
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 ...