Office real estate investment in the world city network: the effects of financial crisis

In the globalization of finance, commercial office real estate investment has come to have an increasing role in the transnational circulation of capital (Knox and Pain 2010). Global city offices used by clustered advanced producer services firms have become key points through which finance flows within and between cities in several ways (Lizieri, 2009). Financial services are corporate real estate occupiers, deeply embedded in global city quarters. They create and manage the investment vehicles that turn physical office infrastructures into liquid assets and through their world-wide city-based office networks, they help to articulate the international flows of finance produced. Thus there are deep and complex interrelations between the physical fabric of global cities, its financial users and city inflows and outflows of capital. City governments have increasingly tried to exploit the opportunities for inward investment that these capital flows present (Brenner and Theodore 2005) but until now there has been a lack of empirical evidence on the dynamics of such flows and how they map onto the ìWorld City Networkîù of financial services (Taylor 2001, 2004). This paper will present new data and analyses from a two-year European Union study mapping the geographies of these city networks and investment flows for the first time, bringing together two complementary theoretical and empirical approaches to the study of financial globalization and helping to inform current questions about the effects of global financial crisis.