GaWC Research Network: David Bassens

Go to: [Key Researchers]

David Bassens

GaWC Associate Director (Financialization)

David Bassens first contributed to GaWC in 2008 with research bulletins on the urban geographies of Islamic finance. At that time David was involved in a 4-year research project sponsored by the Flemish Research Foundation. This project aimed to conceptually and empirically integrate world cities research and global commodity chain research. His research interests lie in two broad areas: (i) Geographies of globalized urbanization: world-city formation and world-city-networks, urban political economies, post-colonial urban critiques, mobility of urban policies (ii) Geographies of finance and financialization: financial geography, economic geography, regulation theory, varieties of capitalism, and the sociology of finance. More specifically, his research pays attention to (i) The discursive and material construction of emerging markets; (ii) Actor-centered and institutional geographies of Islamic finance; (iii) the role of global finance in urban development; (iv) Geographies of the financial crisis; (v) The financialization of financial institutions; and (vi) Geographies of securitization. His ambition is to reappraise GaWC's conceptualization of advanced producer services-driven world-city-formation, which stems from a ‘productionist' reading of post-fordist accumulation strategies in the 1980s, in light of the dominant ‘non-productionist' logic of finance in contemporary global accumulation regimes.

David Bassens is Associate Professor of Economic Geography at the Geography Department of the Free University in Brussels. He is associate director of Cosmopolis, an interdisciplinary urban research team on city, culture & society.