‘Amsterdamned’? The Uncertain Future of a Financial Centre

Much has been written about the spatial effects of the introduction of new information and communication technologies on the flows of finance. Some people conclude that place has become irrelevant, while others maintain that face-to-face relations will remain of the utmost importance. In a seminal paper, Clark and O'Connor have argued against the ‘end of geography’ thesis and have used information-related factors to hypothesize a complex division of financial labour over different spatial scales. In this paper, the case of Amsterdam during the 1990s is used to test the validity of the Clark-O'Connor framework. In the concluding section I suggest some amendments to make the framework more robust.