European Financial Centres in Transition

European Financial Centres in Transition (FINCITY) is a multidisciplinary research project that focusses on how major global events coincide with broader processes of economic restructuring and financialisation in, and beyond, Luxembourg. More specifically, it aims to understand how major European financial centres have been restructured in response to Brexit? which has expelled a large number of financial services firms from the UK, and COVID-19? which has redistributed population away from major urban centres toward smaller agglomerations, and fundamentally altered the 'labourscape' in favour of telework. For this reason, we propose to explore the cities of Amsterdam, Netherlands, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and Luxembourg-City, Luxembourg. By most measures, these cities are three of the most important financial centres in continental Europe.

The projects seeks to discuss the future of financial market places (such as Luxembourg City) in the light of current socio-economic events, most notably the decision of the UK to leave the European Union (Brexit) and also the implications of the COVID-19 Pandemic. There is some indication that these two events or developments have contrasting implications for the centres of the services industries in general and financial market places in particular: changes associated to Brexit have made corporations to leave London, UK, and to re-locate to other financial centres such as Amsterdam, Netherlands; Praris, France; Frankfurt, Germany; or Luxembourg. The COVID-19 Pandemic has shed some light on the crowding of people (workforce, population) which is considered critical for the spread of infections; also, measures undertaken in order to stop the disease from spreading further may hinder the free flow of people or workforce, which seems essential for these services capitals. The project takes these recent developments as a starting point and aims at exploring its short and long-term implications for the financial centres. As a result, the more general pathways of urban development will be studied as well. We propose to explore these processes through the analytical lens of land markets (property), as we guess this is one of the most useful indicators not only for assessing the sectors’ demand for ’space’ (most notably office floorspace, associated buildings, districts), but also for identifying its impact on concurring sectors such as housing (in particular), and thus on urban policies in more general terms. For conducting field research, we have selected the cities of Dublin, Ireland, Frankfurt/Main, Germany, and Luxembourg City -- all three have in common that their economies are dominated by the sectors above, while they are of comparable size (small or mid-range metropolises) and facing similar challenges as of housing, mobility and urban development.