Money, Geographies of

Geography and money are no strangers to each other. A sizeable literature has documented the complex, often contradictory ways in which finance and space are shot through with each other. This topic finds its origins in an earlier sociology of money: Writers as diverse as Karl Marx, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and Georg Simmel were all concerned with the relations between modernity and commodification. Under industrial capitalism, for example, and the waves of urbanization it generated, cities arose as sites of new forms of social relations centered on money, leading to the widespread objectification of social relations in which everyone becomes a buyer or a seller. The researchers of the Chicago School of sociology, particularly Louis Wirth, were appalled by the predatory relations and culture ...