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This Special Issue attempts to clarify how urban infrastructure is being funded, financed and governed. In this commentary, I seek to engage the topic of the Special Issue as a whole – infrastructure financialisation and its governance – albeit through examples provided by individual article contributions. It is a collection emphasising the tangled interaction between public and private, urging a view of financialisation beyond the binary states vs. markets, and highlighting the multiple actors with multiple agendas at play. The articles provide richly detailed accounts of how the local state remains active, participatory and deeply – if not daily – involved in infrastructure financialisation, even/especially when finance is at its most influential. Not without its limitations, three occlusions in this Special Issue present opportunities for future research, namely the need to: i) extend critical analyses of financialisation; ii) enhance related research on social infrastructure, operational phase processes and treatment of the global South; and iii) advance academic analysis of alternatives to infrastructure financialisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on the financialisation of urban infrastructure typically traces how an infrastructure asset's balance sheet is (re)engineered to create a financial asset. What the literature neglects are the processes by which an asset generates urban flows. Attention to these processes, we argue, not only gives better insight into the processes of financialisation of infrastructure but also exposes how the act of financing affects the operations of cities through its influence on the performance of infrastructure assets. The argument presented in the article is informed by case studies of infrastructure investments revealed in interviews conducted in New York, London and Sydney. This material is drawn on to generate a framework for understanding the relationships between infrastructure investing and the infrastructure-enabled flows of a city. This framework has three dimensions through which the financialisation process is seen to be mediated. These are capital structure, organisational structure and regulatory structure. The article argues that these mezzanine-level conceptualisations enable us to explore the to-and-fro between financing and operating cities. A key proposition is that the physical flows of a city are basic not only to the design and enactment of an investment instrument but also to its financial viability. The realisation of this relationship has changed the way investors approach infrastructure assets as investment products. Implications for urban management are drawn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the insertion of urban infrastructure into the risk-taking world of financialisation, techniques for capturing added value from underlying revenue streams, from securitisation and derivatives to the structuring of bond and equity returns, have come to the fore. A value model, based on extraction through interest and dividends paid, as well as multiple fees, in our view, has benefited investors and financial intermediaries alike. Through the example of Carlsbad desalination plant in San Diego, California, the paper sets out to show how a piece of drinking water infrastructure was translated as a value asset to match the needs of institutional investors in the USA and beyond. The geography of value capture and its distribution globally is shown to be not simply financially innovative, but also spatially innovative and perhaps best understood through its topological spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]