Multi-Level Phenomena in Financial Geography: Hierarchies, Systems, and Reflexivity

This special issue invites contributions on multi-level phenomena in financial geography, foregrounding the hierarchies, systems, and reflexive dynamics through which financial actors, institutions and infrastructures interact across space and time.

We welcome theoretical, empirical and methodological papers that conceptualise finance as a complex, adaptive and multi-scalar system, and that investigate how financial geographies are structured and reproduced through hierarchical relationships, inter-level feedback loops, networked interdependencies and reflexive processes across local, national and global contexts.

Rationale

1. Advancing a systems-based understanding of finance
   Financial geography has only recently engaged rigorously with systems thinking (Christophers, 2017). Agent-based simulations (Chen, Zheng, Li et al. 2017) and relational network mapping (Siemiatycki 2011; Van Meeteren & Bassens 2016) have demonstrated how systemic complexity and emergent behaviours arise from actor interactions. This special issue extends these insights by reinterpreting phenomena such as financial inclusion, investor behaviour, and market formation as products of complex and networked processes.
2. Reinvigorating the concept of scale
   Building on studies such as Rodríguez-Pose and Sandu (2025), which demonstrate how trust and exclusion unfold across institutional and territorial scales, and Aiello and Bonanno (2018), which show how multilevel modelling can capture the nested effects of geography on small banks, this issue theorises hierarchy as a constitutive feature of finance, highlighting the ways in which multi-layered regulatory regimes, institutional governance, and reflexive feedback loops shape financial outcomes.
3. Advancing methodological pluralism
   As Wójcik (2021) observes, financial geography still lacks systematic engagement with methodological diversity. Examples of such approaches include hierarchical models (Aiello and Bonanno 2018; Rodríguez-Pose and Sandu 2025), relational network mapping (Siemiatycki 2011; Van Meeteren & Bassens 2016), and agent-based simulations (Chen, Zheng, Li et al. 2017). This special issue will build on these precedents to demonstrate the potential of such methods for illuminating inter-level dynamics, systemic complexity, and emergent behaviours.

Topics of Interest

We welcome contributions that engage with multi-level, networked and reflexive perspectives in financial geography, including but not limited to:

• Asset manager capitalism and investment geographies
• Housing financialisation and affordability
• Financial exclusion, sanctions and digital alternatives
• Sustainability, governance and ownership structures
• Digital finance, FinTech and inequality
• Methodological innovation
• Comparative, historical and cross-sectoral perspectives
• Policy, regulation and governance across scales

References

Aiello, F., and Bonanno, G. (2018) Multilevel empirics for small banks in local markets. Papers in Regional Science, 97(4): 1017-1038

Chen, TT., Zheng, B., Li, Y. et al. New approaches in agent-based modeling of complex financial systems. Front. Phys. 12, 128905 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11467-017-0661-2

Christophers, B. (2017). The performativity of the ‘new’ economic geography: Financialisation, models, and methods. Journal of Economic Geography, 17(5), 1123–1144.

Rodríguez-Pose, A., & Sandu, A. (2025). Banking on trust: Institutional trust and the geography of financial exclusion in Central and Eastern Europe. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 57(7), 921-948.

Siematycki M (2011) Public-private partnership networks: exploring business-government relationships in United Kingdom transportation projects. Economic Geography 87(3): 309–334.

Van Meeteren, M., & Bassens, D. (2016). World cities and the uneven geographies of financialization: Unveiling stratification and hierarchy in the world city archipelago. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 40(1), 62-81.

Wójcik, D. (2021). Financial geography III: Research strategies, designs, methods and data. Progress in Human Geography, 46(1), 245-254.

Submission Instructions

In the first instance, please submit a 300-word abstract and author details to franziska.sohns@aru.ac.uk.
Please indicate that your paper is for the special issue: “Multi-Level Phenomena in Financial Geography.”

Shortlisted authors will be invited to submit full papers to Finance & Space for peer review in line with journal standards.

Read the Instructions for Authors on Finance and Space

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