Affective atmospheres of finance: gendered impacts of financialization within Sydney's Barangaroo development

This chapter presents an emerging examination of the impact of financialization on the material design and construction of the contemporary global city and how the altered urban landscape shapes and genders social interaction in Sydney’s Barangaroo development. The scale of urban redevelopment in Barangaroo, as with other global city projects, presents new challenges regarding the potential ceding of public space to financial industries and speaks to wider issues of ‘social cleansing’ of prime urban locales. In this context, the chapter draws on the concept of ‘affective atmospheres’ to examine how people, buildings and technologies, including forms of non-human life, come together within Barangaroo to engender an affections response to place and create, in turn, a gendered ‘energy of feeling’. The chapter focuses on and explores the affective atmospheres of the boundary, temporality, the slippery material properties of glass and light and the gendered effects of these spaces. In doing so, it analyses how Barangaroo’s urban design, framed by a tough exclusionary exoskeleton common to financial place making projects, engenders a sense of alienation and displacement by embodying or projecting finance capital’s culture of masculinist rationality.