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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]

Drawing upon a case study of regional transit in Denver, Colorado, this article describes and accounts for the emergence of the global infrastructure public-private partnership (GIP3) as a novel extra-territorial mechanism for financing and delivering transportation infrastructure projects across large metropolitan regions in the United States (US). Unlike traditional locally-funded public-private partnerships, a GIP3 involves a global (i.e. extra-territorial) consortium of private sector construction firms and investors which enters into a long-term contract with a regional public agency to finance, operate, maintain and deliver strategic investments in transportation infrastructure. In 2004, Denver region voters approved a sales tax increase to fund the Denver Regional Transportation District (RTD)'s US$4.7 billion FasTracks programme, a 122-mile extension of light and commuter rail along six corridors. Faced with a shortfall in regional funding, the Denver RTD subsequently entered into a contract with a GIP3 consortium to finance and deliver the Eagle P3 project, a major component of the FasTracks system to Denver International Airport. The article argues that future research on GIP3 contractual agreements needs to consider the local control of infrastructure assets and the integrity of supporting regional collaborative governance arrangements. [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]

Debates around infrastructure tend to focus on the global North, yet in the global South demand for infrastructure is huge and we see new and emergent actors engaged in finance and construction; China being pre-eminent among them. China's interests in the global South have grown apace over the past decade, especially in terms of accessing resources and securing infrastructure deals. The role of Chinese banks and State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in financing and building the projects reveals a blurring between geopolitical and commercial interests and processes. The article situates China's entry into the global South as part of a geopolitics that is simultaneously geoeconomic and interrogates these issues through case studies of Chinese-backed projects in Ghana and Cambodia. These projects are spatially and politically complex, with China adopting a range of financing models – often including an element of resource swaps – in which bank finance is critical and marks the Chinese as different from Western financiers. These international deals are secured at the political elite level and so bypass established forms of national governance and accountability in the recipient countries, while the turnkey construction projects remain locally enclaved. The cases also show that wider developmental benefits are limited, with 'ordinary' citizens – especially those in the rural areas – gaining relatively little from these major energy projects and the benefits accruing to urban-based elites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]