Schumpeter's Gesetz and Gestalt in space: exploring evolutionary economic geographies of money and finance.

This article examines the insufficient integration of money and finance into the research agenda of evolutionary economic geography (EEG), advocating for a renewed engagement with Joseph Schumpeter’s dual concepts of Gesetz (the disequilibrating role of credit creation and financial innovation) and Gestalt (the evolutionary social form of capitalism). It argues that Schumpeter’s monetary theory, emphasizing the endogenous creation of credit and the hierarchical, power-laden nature of money, offers a valuable framework for understanding spatial economic development and the dynamics of financialisation and urbanisation. The paper highlights the post-Great Financial Crisis surge in economic geography research on money and finance, identifying three interconnected strands: geographies of money, political geographies of financialised capitalism, and financial geographies, and calls for a pluralistic EEG approach that incorporates monetary analysis to better capture the spatial laws of motion in a credit-driven capitalist economy. Ultimately, it proposes that integrating Schumpeterian monetary perspectives can enrich EEG’s understanding of regional resilience, instability, and the co-evolution of finance and urban space.