• Universiteit van Amsterdam

• Wetenschappelijk

• Arbeid & Inkomen,
• Openbare ruimte

Portraying the Global Financial Crisis: Myth, Aesthetics, and the City

From 2007 until today an intricate set of events has been unsettling the global financial markets. The naming of these incidents has been multifold, varying between a general rhetoric of economic downturn (‘crash’, ‘crunch’, ‘meltdown’, ‘hangover’) and more descriptive terminologies indicating the reasons, geographic involvements, and historic time-span of the developments at hand such as: ‘US subprime mortgage crisis’, ‘European sovereign-debt crisis’, and ‘late 2000s financial crisis’. From the outset, the media played a key role in communicating and interpreting these market developments. In this essay I will focus on the role of cities in attempts to picture the GFC. Central to my analysis is the thesis that, by showing specific images and staging the urban experience of different cities (above all London and New York), the inconsistencies pervading the GFC have been indicated, interrelated, and rendered iconographic.