ABSTRACT
At present, there is a fundamental discord between the organizational “architecture” of the finance industry and its perceived materiality. In recent decades, globalization and its impact on the built and social fabric of cities has been at the forefront of urban studies, provoking a prolific array of polemical prefixes such as “mega”-, “entrepot” and “global”. However, our conceptualization of the global financial system has thus far rested on the assumption that cities are nodes in a larger economic and technological network, positioning them as messy junctions within an otherwise seamless system. The reality is that approximately 80 per cent (by value) of international transactions technically take place outside of this system, in the supposedly “deterritorialized” realm of offshore finance. 1
