Embracing financialization’s negative cases

This review examines how Financialization and Local Statecraft advances theorization of urban financialization by foregrounding negative cases—instances where expected financialized outcomes fail to appear. It argues that prevailing research focuses too heavily on positive cases, overlooking how financialization’s links to other governance projects results in its uneven development. By embedding financialization within larger practices of local statecraft, the book shows how financial logics of urban governance are mediated within the UK’s centralized system. The results both reveal the contingent nature of urban financialization and offer a model for the strengthening the theorization of local financialization.