In this short commentary, I assess Pike in relation to those other contributions in urban and regional studies that work with the notion of statecraft. Pike makes an important contribution to ongoing debates on the changing contours of the financialisation of English local government. That said, my argument is that the analysis stops short of revealing the details of the work done by the rather abstract notion of “financialisation” in terms of urban politics, and here I mean with a large and small “P.”
Kevin Ward (Sun,) studied this question.