Financialising City Statecraft and Infrastructure: a reader's guide

摘要

Motivations, aims and arguments As part of its investment strategy, Portsmouth City Council in the UK has acquired a DHL distribution centre near Birmingham, a Waitrose store in Somerset, a Matalan warehouse in Swindon, and leased its Isle of Wight ferry link to Canada Life. Why was a local government in southern England buying commercial properties outside its area and letting its local infrastructure to an international insurance company? Political-economic curiosity about such phenomena was a central motivation for writing Financialising City Statecraft and Infrastructure. The current episode of financialisation is marked by the increasing involvement and influence of financial actors, relations, rationales and practices on people, firms, states and places. Local governments in the UK and elsewhere are embroiled in such financialisation. Attempting to cope with fiscal stress with often limited powers and resources, local governments are being drawn into economic and financial strategies, instruments and commitments that extend and deepen their relations with new actors and sites within and beyond their administrative areas - including distribution and retail firms, commercial properties, new types of funding and financing techniques and various kinds of financial institutions. Amid this financialisation, further impetus for the book came from seeing national and local governments struggling to fund, finance and govern urban infrastructure, the erosion of the collective good dimensions of infrastructure and its uneven transformation into financial assets and revenue streams, the explanatory limits of existing urban governance archetypes and transformation frameworks, enduring managerialism especially in highly centralised states such as the UK and stirring interest in alternatives.