Multiple financial modernities: international financial centres, urban boosters and the internet as the site of negotiations

Multiple financial modernities. International financial centres, urban boosters and the Internet as the site of negotiations, Regional Studies. The 1990s and 2000s (the ‘noughties’) saw a large number of urban boosters trying to frame specific international financial centres (IFCs) as hotspots for global financial activities. This paper investigates the images projected through dedicated websites of different IFCs to trace the self-representations and self-understandings of IFCs and their boosters. It investigates, first, the extent to which urban boosters are deliberately pursuing financial strategies through the Internet; and, second, how their negotiations of the global and the local, space and place, the universal and the particular, modernity and tradition result in ‘multiple modernities’ as projected through the imaginaries on IFC websites.