One of the four factors of production, capital includes all the items designed by society to further the creation of wealth. Plant, machinery, and buildings are fixed capital—they earn profit without circulating further; see Melachroinos and Spence (2001) PHG 25, 3. D. Harvey (1982) considers the coercion that fixed capital exerts upon capitalists. Circulating capital (floating capital) includes raw materials, fuels, components, and labour inputs which are then sold—in the form of the product—at a profit; see Henderson (1998) Antipode 30, 2. Financial capital is the money necessary for production; although G. Duménil and D. Lévy (2004) argue that financial capital is unproductive.

Commercial capital

mediates in the circulation of commodities for a fee, but has no long-term control over it; ‘for Marx, a specialized commercial capital and financial capital drive down the costs of circulation and finance—reducing the deductions they make from the profits of industrial capital and speeding up capital turnover and reinvestment’ (Dunford and Pickvance (2007) PPG 31, 4).

Knowledge capital

encompasses ‘talents, skills, know-how, know-what, and relationships’ (T. Stewart 2001). Amin and Thrift (2007) PHG 31, 2 link urbanism with fast capitalism—rapid information and communication technologies together with their impact on self, society, and culture. See P. Taylor (2004).

Capital is seen as a social relation, symbolizing the economic relationships between individuals and/or groups; ‘the result of social labour achieved in the creation of goods and services’ (Tickell and Peck (1992) PHG 16; see also Pasinetti in M. Baranzini and R. Scazzieri, eds. 1986).

Geographers focus on capital as a source of uneven development; Walker (1978) Rev. Radical Polit. Econ. 10 is still worth quoting: ‘[the] mobility of capital means that capital may use location as a strategy against labour, local development becomes more dependent on outside capital, and development comes and goes over time…and capital generates a permanent reserve of stagnant places; a lumpengeography of capital.’ See spatio-temporal fix. Grettler (2001) Env. Hist. 6 argues that capitalism has been the greatest force for environmental change in America; see also M. W. Lewis (1992).

Capital switching

refers to a change in the nature of investment as capitalist production edges towards periodic crises of overaccumulation. The switch is from production into production of the urban built environment as a means to absorb surplus capital and hence avert a crisis, even if only temporarily. Christophers (2011) AAAG 101, 6, 1347 finds a clear pattern of capital switching in the USA into the built environment since the turn of the millennium.