Book symposium: Pike et al.’s Financialising City Statecraft and Infrastructure

Abstract

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. Who owns, runs and pays for infrastructure? This question crystallised our concerns. Responses to it determine infrastructural provision, its costs and which people and places can access it and on what terms. The book's aims are twofold: to investigate and better understand the engagements of financialisation with city governance and infrastructural provision and to identify the wider and longer-term implications of such financialisation for urban and regional development, politics and policy. A central contention is that explaining contemporary city infrastructure and its governance needs a better understanding of financialisation. The book works with an interdisciplinary understanding of infrastructure systems that provide the services we all rely upon for our day-today lives. Services such as heat, light, hydration, shelter, connection and mobility enable our basic daily tasks of cooking, eating, resting, washing, communicating with each other and moving around on bikes, boats, cars, foot, trains and trams. Infrastructure underpins and connects sites for fundamental human and social activities in the home, and places to live, learn, work and play across the world. Infrastructure is made up of inescapably geographical interconnection...

Grasping the nettle: the central–local constraints on local government funding in England

“…The central arguments and findings in the article also have potentially broader application, as England has long been seen as a laboratory for new forms and techniques of policy and governance (Pike et al, 2019b). All countries have unique central-local contexts and administrative procedures for funding their public services.…”

Operational Challenges and Mega Sporting Events Legacy: The Case of BRT Systems in the Global South

“…To do so, it is expected to be reliable, sustainable, and resilient [39] to sudden short-term shocks such as extreme weather events (e.g., heavy rainfall and flooding), and longer-term transformations such as urban expansions. To be sustainable as a public good, it also needs to be financially sustainable, hence have a viable business model to continue operating; as a matter of illustration, this explains the recent diversification of forms of funding (and financing) across the world to operate transport infrastructures (see, for example, [12]). Private operators, who as a business need to cover their operational costs and hence the continuous funding of the infrastructure while making profit in order to provide the service, often manage transport operations and/or infrastructure in urban areas.…”

“…Conceptually, it broadens the legacy discussion into the sustainable urban transport arena; much of the early research (e.g., [1][2][3]17,18]) is from a sports or events perspective [16], but the evolving themes of legacies as tools to deliver socio-economic benefits to the host city [8] requires alignment with research into sustainable urban development. This is paramount for transport legacies, which as levers of public funding [12,15] must be integrated with long-term strategic urban planning.…”

“…To achieve this, the paper uses the term of operational sustainability, which is here shaped around the aim of assessing conflicting temporalities during setup of the project and hence reflecting on the wider implications for the long-term running and management of the network. We do so by bringing together the literature on MSE, sustainability, transport management, and infrastructure [8][9][10][11][12].This paper focuses on two cities whose transport network has been significantly impacted by hosting MSEs: Cape Town (South Africa) with the 2010 FIFA Football World Cup, and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) with the 2016 Olympic Games. Each city constructed new bus rapid transit (BRT systems) under the auspices of hosting a MSE, and self-identified this in their proprietary communications and strategies as a transport legacy of the MSE.…”

“…To achieve this, the paper uses the term of operational sustainability, which is here shaped around the aim of assessing conflicting temporalities during setup of the project and hence reflecting on the wider implications for the long-term running and management of the network. We do so by bringing together the literature on MSE, sustainability, transport management, and infrastructure [8][9][10][11][12].…”