Cribbed from biology, the idea that flows of capital can materially regenerate the interconnective tissue of the environment has had a powerful hold on policymakers over the last three decades. But the metaphor of 'urban regeneration' has a range that goes well beyond new postindustrial uses for warehouses, canals and docklands. Urbanisation demonstrates a seemingly infinite capacity to regenerate age-old practices of extortion, usually through the violent exploitation of the social need for space.

In the case of the industrial city of the mid-nineteenth century, Marx, familiar with the expropriative practices of rent-gouging landlords, called this racket 'secondary exploitation', because the swindling of money from the income of workers complemented and reinforced the 'primary' exploitation found in the place of production. Lefebvre's hypothesis was that, with the growth of the real estate and construction industry into a full blown sector of commercial capital, what had been 'for a long time a secondary sector' – the service sector market for private property in land – was asserting a totally new dominance over the social relations of capitalism.[1] The 'secondary circuit' of real estate was thus not only growing in influence; through planetary urbanisation its influence was transforming, providing a platform enabling finance capital to scale space, making it theoretically possible for financial capitalists to cognitively map any landscape as a potential rent surface.

Still, we might ask, what precisely did culture have to do with the global accumulation of rent? At a general level this meant a new appreciation of art, music, literature, cinema, theatre and so forth as the instrumental signifiers of metropolitan culture, which, in a society dominated by the need for fresh sensory and cognitive stimulus, expressed a powerful method of distinguishing the value of one place from that of another. But at another, more specifically spatial level it meant that that urban fabric was seen as a creative environment, in which the particularities of culture, amidst the buzzing sensorium of city life, become subject to microeconomic judgement. Thus culture designated both an overall environment of aesthetic production and consumption, and the spatial aesthetic through which the various forms of collective life could be evaluated for financial content.

In 1920 Alfred Marshall, one of the founders of neoclassical economics, famously described the peculiarities of the industrial districts of cities in terms of their 'special atmospheres', milieus where the 'mysteries' of nineteenth century trades ‘become no mysteries, but are as it were in the air, and children learn many of them unconsciously’.[2] In the twenty-first century, the spatial system of commercial capital (real estate) began to appreciate these 'special atmospheres' as the key urban attractor for the labour force of technology companies and, of course, the earliest adopter of technological innovations, financial service companies.

It was no coincidence, then, that as companies competed to invest in particular locations in order to monopolise their technological atmospheres architects like Richard Rogers and economists like Edward Glaeser adopted an approach informed by the ideas of new urbanism. The historical richness, geographical complexity and social connectivity of urban space were cultivated because it represented an apparatus to capture the 'human capital' that economists argue forms the social subsoil of 'intellectual rent'.[3] So in a strange inversion what we find is that, although the twenty-first century was said to represent a global shift of human population from rural to urban ways of life, under planetary urbanisation the economy of cities is tending towards a mode of accumulation that appears almost agricultural in its absolute pursuit of all possible sources of rent. If urbanisation was the platform which enabled a new globalising variant of absolute rent, then urbanism manifested its cultural logic, with its ideology crowned in the sovereign form of the 'global city' and embodied in the theory of human capital.

In this respect, the critique of the global city tracked the modernist concern with the interaction between the circulation of money and the customs and mentalities of the metropolis. The new significance, however, was not the volatile imprint of money capital on the practices of daily life; rather, what was at stake was the way every space occupied by life could be, through continuous evaluation of its potential rent, cultivated as new ground for financial exploitation. The implication, therefore, of 'the planetarisation of the urban' was a global tendency to treat all kinds of spaces as potential private properties that could yield monopoly-like profits.

From the gene to the body, from the city to the globe, any space whatever could be pulled into the realm of financial abstraction.[4] And because the conversion of land into real estate gave the gaseous liquidity of interest-bearing capital a geographical orientation, it meant that the financial market could be more closely mapped onto an entire set of social, psychological and ecological practices unrelated to markets (like healthcare, education, art and culture, communication, and so forth) such that modes of urban speculation could assert an climatic influence on the total motion of everyday life almost as if finance had entered the earth's biosphere. Which perhaps is the reason why – and this helps to explain Jameson's most popular maxim – everybody is contractually obliged to save capitalism instead of preventing the end of the world, simply because capital has a cognitive monopoly on the way the world is valued.