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This Special Issue aims to further understanding and explanation of the funding, financing and governing of urban infrastructure amidst its engagements with contemporary financialisation. Drawing upon empirical material from international cases from Europe, North America, Africa and Asia, it identifies critical issues to advance work in this area. These themes concern: the impacts of financialisation upon shifting the definitions and conceptualisations of urban infrastructure; the worth of adopting more actor-oriented and grounded approaches to financialisation; the importance of affording greater recognition to national and local states as the objects and agents of financialising relations, processes and practices; the substance and ramifications of the emergent informalisation of infrastructure policy-making and governance; and, the implications of financialisation for the evolving and uneven landscapes of urban infrastructure provision. The arguments are, first, that how infrastructure is funded, financed and governed is integral to explaining socially and spatially uneven infrastructural provision and its urban development ramifications; and second, the engagements of urban infrastructure with contemporary financialisation have become central in such accounts. Future research avenues are identified. These comprise: identifying exactly how revenues are generated from infrastructure assets; specifying the relations of financialisation with other processes such as 'assetisation', 'marketisation' and privatisation; extending the geographical and comparative reach of current studies; elaborating the spaces of regulation in negotiating and accommodating infrastructure financialisation; and, scrutinising the roles of decentralised powers and resources in financialising urban infrastructure and exploring its alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the financialisation of Brussels Airport following the acquisition in 2004 of a majority stake by the Australian Macquarie Bank. Adopting a variegated capitalism perspective, we argue for a greater sensitivity to the mutually constitutive relation between durable institutional governance structures and financialised practices injected by global investors. The case of Brussels Airport presents an informative case to examine this relation, as Macquarie has had to continuously interact with the Belgian federal state in its different guises of contractor, co-owner and regulator to implement financialisation. While Macquarie indeed brought in risks that are structurally associated with profit making through financial means, the governance of these practices is shaped by the Belgian state's distinctive and pragmatic approach to infrastructure privatisation: the state enables these practices, but also contests them in case of a direct clash with its interests. Meanwhile, the regulatory environment marks the contradictory meeting point of two varieties of capitalism: while the light-handed regulatory framework is inspired by the UK's airport industry, the Belgian regulator does not possess similar abilities as a UK regulator, and resultantly, informal negotiations between the stakeholders are more influential in the airport's governance. The case of Brussels Airport shows that the state plays an active role in constituting global capitalism, yet also shapes how financialisation works out on the ground. To understand the tensions that mark the governance of financialised infrastructure, it is therefore imperative to be sensitive to the local, historical and political trajectories that underwrite the variegated outcomes of financialisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores a tension between financialisation of electricity infrastructures and efforts to bring critical urban systems into common ownership. Focusing on the emerging landscape of electricity regulation and e-mobility in the United Kingdom (UK), it examines how electricity grid ownership has become financialised, and why the economic assumptions that enabled this financialisation are being called into question. New technologies, such as smart electricity meters and electric vehicles, provide cities with new tools to tackle poor air quality and greenhouse gas emissions. Electricity grids are key enabling infrastructures but the companies that run them do not get rewarded for improving air quality or tackling climate change. UK government regulation of electricity grids both enables financialisation and forecloses opportunities to manage the infrastructure for wider environmental and public benefit. Nonetheless, the addition of smart devices to this network – the 'smart grid' – opens up an opportunity for common ownership of the infrastructure. Transforming the smart grid into commons necessitates deep structural reform to the entire architecture of infrastructure regulation in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we explore how global infrastructure investment funds and actors are financialising the local growth machine in Chicago, and how Chicago's transforming growth machine uses its influence to financialise urban governance policy goals and institutional arrangements. We view global infrastructure investors through the lens of place entrepreneurs seeking to extract monopoly rents from urban infrastructure. As place entrepreneurs, global infrastructure investors have an interest in forming alliances with other place entrepreneurs to generate political and institutional capacity for infrastructure financialisation. Our case study examines the concrete and specific ways in which global financial firms and actors work in partnership with Chicago's business civic organisation, World Business Chicago, to shape the City of Chicago's planning processes and orchestrate a more mature institutional-regulatory infrastructure investment environment through the formation of the Chicago Infrastructure Trust, the city's public–private partnership infrastructure bank. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How urban infrastructure is funded, financed and governed is a central issue for states at the national, city-regional and city scales. Urban infrastructure is being financialised by financial and state actors and transformed into an asset in the international investment landscape. Local governments are being compelled by national state and financial institutions to be more entrepreneurial in their infrastructure funding and financing and to reorganise their governance arrangements. This article explains the socially and spatially uneven unfolding and implications of urban infrastructure financialisation and local government attempts to implement more entrepreneurial practices and governance forms. The empirical focus is the City Deals in the UK: a new form of urban governance and infrastructure investment based upon negotiated central–local government agreements on decentralised powers, responsibilities and resources. The continued authority of the highly centralised UK national state, its managerialist institutions and conservative/risk-averse administrative culture have constrained urban infrastructure financialisation and entrepreneurial urban governance in the UK City Deals. Situated in their particular spatial, temporal, political-economic and institutional settings, financialisation is understood as a socially and spatially variegated process and urban governance is interpreted as the articulation and mixing of new entrepreneurial and enduring managerialist forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects upon a comparative analysis of the 28 ‘City Deals’ agreed between UK government, Scottish government and city-regional groupings in England and Scotland since 2011. The City Deals have sought to incentivise local actors to identify and prioritise ‘asks’ of UK and devolved governments, fund, finance and deliver infrastructure and other economic development interventions, and to reform city/city-region governance structures to ‘unlock’ urban growth. Our analysis is based upon 32 in-depth interviews with lead actors in the City Deals, including elected officials from local government, central government officials and policy specialists from think tanks, as well as a secondary literature review. We find that City Deals are reworking the role of the UK state internally and through changed central-local and intra-local (city-regional) relations. Regional and urban public policy is being recast as a process of deal-making founded upon territorial competition and negotiation between central national and local actors unequally endowed with information and resources, leading to highly imbalanced and inequitable outcomes across the UK. As a template for public policymaking in an emergent and decentralising context, deal-making raises substantive and unresolved issues for governance in the UK that are especially pertinent as the new Conservative government at Westminster pledges to widen and broaden this approach as a central component of its future devolution strategy and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws upon territorial and relational approaches as well as work on the economics and politics of devolution to argue that a geographically sensitive political economy of the ‘qualitative state’ can interpret the roles, structures, strategies and practices of states in attempting to resolve the governance of uneven development. An empirical analysis of the UK state's governance of economic development within England reveals the construction of enabling frameworks at the national level and, in the wake of regionalization and regionalism, the encouragement of new ‘spatial imaginaries’ (cities and/or city-regions, localisms and pan-regionalisms). The result has been complexity, experimentation, fragmentation and incoherence with largely negative implications for territorial equity and justice. We conclude by reflecting upon the limits of projects of state decentralization and spatial policy under a strong national economic growth orientation in addressing the governance of uneven development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

• Global city-regions dominate national political-economies and fuel uneven development. • State actors are using speculative financial mechanisms to attract new capital. • Entrepreneurialism and managerialism shaping urban infrastructure governance. The governance of infrastructure funding and financing at the city-region scale is a critical aspect of the continued search for mechanisms to channel investment into the urban landscape. In the context of the global financial crisis, austerity and uneven growth, national, sub-national and local state actors are being compelled to adopt the increasingly speculative activities of urban entrepreneurialism to attract new capital, develop 'innovative' financial instruments and models, and establish new or reform existing institutional arrangements for urban infrastructure governance. Amidst concerns about the claimed 'ungovernability' of 'global' cities and city-regions, governing urban infrastructure funding and financing has become an acute issue. Infrastructure renewal and development are interpreted as integral to urban growth, especially to underpin the size and scale of large cities and their significant contributions within national economies. Yet, overcoming fragmented local jurisdictions to improve the governance and economic, social and environmental development of major metropolitan areas remains a challenge. The complex, and sometimes conflicting and contested inter-relationships at stake raise important questions about the role of the state in wrestling with entrepreneurial and managerialist governance imperatives. City and government actors are simultaneously engaging with financial actors, the financialisation of the built environment, the enduring and integral position of the state in infrastructure given its particular characteristics, the transformation of infrastructure from a public good into an asset class through the agency of private and state interests, and what relationships, if any, exist between 'effective' urban governance systems and improved economic performance. Contributing to theoretical debates about the apparent 'ungovernability' of global cities and city-regions, this paper presents analysis and findings from new research examining the financialisation and governance of transport infrastructure in the London global city-region. The continued rise in London's population is placing significant demands upon existing infrastructure assets and systems and provoking debates about the extent and nature of growth in the UK's capital, the development of and relationship between urban and sub-urban built environments, and the ability of national, sub-national and local actors to plan infrastructure renewal and investment both within London's formal administrative boundary and wider city-region. Combining aspects of urban entrepreneurialism and managerialism amidst the challenges of governing a global city-region, the search for new infrastructure investment by state actors is leading to the revival of specific funding and financing mechanisms and practices. The mixing of existing and new funding and financing techniques as well as governance arrangements in distinct and, at times, hybrid ways, is amplifying the novel challenges facing actors and institutions responsible for London's governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]