Financializing Desalination: Rethinking the Returns of Big Infrastructure

Against the trend prevalent during the 1990s and 2000s, large‐scale infrastructural projects have made a comeback in the water sector. Although sometimes framed as part of a broader sustainable transition, the return of big infrastructure is a much more complicated story in which finance has played a crucial role. In the following article, we explore this encounter between finance and water infrastructure using the case of Britain's first experiment in desalination technologies, the Thames Water Desalination Plant (TWDP). On the surface, the plant appears to be a classic example of the successes of normative industrial ecology, in which sustainability challenges have been met with forward‐thinking green innovations. However, the TWDP is utterly dependent on a byzantine financial model, which has shaped Thames Water's investment strategy over the last decade. This article returns to the fundamental question of whether London ever needed a desalination plant in the first place. Deploying an urban political ecology approach, we demonstrate how the plant is simultaneously an iconic illustration of ecological modernization and a fragile example of an infrastructure‐heavy solution to the demands of financialization. Understanding the development of the TWDP requires a focus on the scalar interactions between flows of finance, waste, energy and water that are woven through the hydrosocial cycle of London.     

A Small Entrepreneurial City in Action: Policy Mobility,Urban Entrepreneurialism,and Politics of Scale in Jiyuan,China

This research details the mundane practices of policy mobility and entrepreneurial endeavour in Jiyuan in relation to the city's changing administrative position, and is one of the first attempts at understanding how entrepreneurial policies are mobilized, mutated and diffused in a small inland Chinese city. We interpret Jiyuan's evolving development strategies and trajectory through two interrelated conceptual lenses—policy mobility and urban entrepreneurialism—bridged by an analysis of the politics of scale. Over the past three decades, governance strategies in Jiyuan have evolved from policy imitation, during the germination of urban entrepreneurialism, to policy mutation and diffusion, under the amplification of entrepreneurialism, as the city has moved up the administrative levels and urban hierarchy. Policy mobility and urban entrepreneurialism in Jiyuan, involving a multi‐scalar process, are being shaped by the interactions between the city, the region, the central state and global capital under the confluence of globalization and marketization. The ‘successful’ story of a small entrepreneurial city tells a new tale that can inform wider contexts by painting a fuller portrait of the evolution of an entrepreneurial city across different scales and time and bringing cities hitherto ‘off the map’ back into the picture of urban entrepreneurialism against the backdrop of globalization.     

Demolishing the Present to Sell off the Future? The Emergence of ‘Financialized Municipal Entrepreneurialism’ in London

This article introduces a new mode of urban entrepreneurialism in London through a study of the state‐executed, speculative development and financialization of public land. In response to an intensifying housing crisis and austerity‐imposed fiscal constraints, municipalities in London are devising entrepreneurial solutions to deliver more housing. Among these ‘solutions’ can be found the early signs of the state‐executed financialization of public housing in the UK with the use of speculative council‐owned special purpose vehicles (SPVs) that replace existing public housing stock with mixed‐tenure developments, creating ambiguous public/private tenancies that function as homes and the basis for liquid financial assets. Drawing together parallel literatures on the financialization of urban governance and housing, and combining these with original empirical research, we situate these developments in contrast to earlier modes of governance, identifying a distinct mode of entrepreneurial governance in London: financialized municipal entrepreneurialism. The local state is no longer merely the enabler—limited to providing strategic oversight of the private sector—but financializes its practice in a reimagined commercialized interventionism, as property speculator. This article concludes that while the architects of this new mode of entrepreneurialism extol the increased capacity and control it provides, any such gains must be set against longer‐term financial, democratic and political risks.     

San Francisco Through Bogotá’s Eyes: Leveraging Urban Policy Change through the Circulation of Media Objects

This article connects two emerging debates in urban studies—the need to pay more attention to the role of nonhuman actors in urban planning and the ways in which media objects affect urban politics and planning—by examining how a video on Bogotá’s car‐free Ciclovía program facilitated the adoption and implementation of a similar program in San Francisco. The analysis shows that media objects have the capacity to act as fulcrums in processes of leveraging urban policy change owing to their potential to alter urban governance structures. The article analyzes the digital storytelling and ‘eye‐opening’ practices through which the video enabled policy changes to be implemented in San Francisco, while also tracing the local and transnational actors, networks and agendas that were involved in the production and circulation of the video through digital archival research and multi‐sited fieldwork. In doing so, it shows the active role that media objects play in shaping urban policymaking processes and provides an example of a relational methodology for studying the digital materialities through which urban policy ideas increasingly circulate.     

Futures of Crisis,Futures of Urban Political Theory: Flooding in Asian Coastal Megacities

Coastal megacities across Asia have experienced devastating floods in recent years. Studies project dramatic increases in populations prone to chronic flooding and potential permanent inundation of densely populated urban areas in future decades. The uncertainties presented by future flood risks disrupt prevalent state visions of globalization‐driven prosperity. The emerging reality of a shift in relationship between water and urban settlements has begun driving recalibration of power relations around a range of issues, including longstanding contestations over infrastructure delivery, housing, land rights and political representation. Flood mitigation efforts have played out in debates over displacement and eviction, and distributional concerns about the costs and benefits of these initiatives. This article develops a conceptual framework for assessing the implications of projections of flood risk for urban political theory. The article begins by identifying political contestations that emerge around the varied ways water intersects with urban processes—through dynamics of permeability, flow and drainage, aquifers and pipes, and coastal defense. It then explores how projections of the crisis of flooding have reshaped three contemporary debates in urban politics: those around property rights and the question of ‘informality’; around neoliberalization and financialization; and around the rescaling of the state. Finally, it briefly deploys this framework to examine the case of Jakarta.     

How Subordinate Financialization Shapes Urban Development: The Rise and Fall of Warsaw's Służewiec Business District

This article studies the development of Warsaw's S?u?ewiec neighbourhood, Poland's largest business district, as a case of real estate financialization. We argue that the neighbourhood's chaotic ‘de‐contextualized’ growth was shaped by Poland's semi‐peripheral position in the global economy on the one hand—enabling a process of subordinate financialization—and legacies of state socialism on the other. In so doing, we mobilize research on peripheral financialization and global economic hierarchies, and studies of post‐socialism to enhance debates about real estate financialization. Commercial real estate—and office development in particular—is a crucial domain in which contemporary core–periphery structures are produced and negotiated. A key function of subordinate financialization is to absorb globally mobile capital—the product of financialization in the core. The case of S?u?ewiec shows that only by considering the interplay of global hierarchies (Poland's position as capital absorbent), local dynamics (fragmented urban development, which was characterized by competition among these unequal municipalities, with local growth coalitions in some municipalities, but not in others) and specific historical legacies (Warsaw's socialist‐time functional organization and its transformation, which weakened the city) can we fully understand the specific dynamics that shape real estate financialization in different places.     

Financialization,Urban Governance and the Planning System: Utilizing ‘Development Viability’ as a Policy Narrative for the Liberalization of Ireland's Post‐Crash Planning System

Drawing upon the Irish case, this article explores the interaction between the financialized economy and the urban planning system. While considerable scholarship has examined the financialization of real estate, it remains unclear how planning systems are being repurposed to facilitate a finance‐led regime of urban growth or how the ‘real estate–financial complex’ seeks to enact planning policy transformations that support its interests. This article explores how such actors have advanced the concept of ‘financial viability of development’ as a means of influencing the post‐crisis re‐regulation of Irish planning policy. This group has argued that housing construction in post‐crash Ireland is unviable given the high development finance costs, onerous planning gain contributions and the lack of development certainty in the planning process. As such, housing construction has been at an all‐time‐low, leading to a new crisis in affordable housing provision. In response, a complicit state has further liberalized the planning system, introducing an array of policies that are evermore facilitative of development interests. Empirical findings, based on interviews with developers, lobbyists and planners, emphasize the importance of informal access to policymakers, the wielding of ‘expert knowledge’ and media management to co‐opt the state into adopting financial viability within planning policymaking.     

The Social,Spatial, and Economic Roots of Urban Inequality in Africa: Contextualizing Jane Jacobs and Henry George

Unravelling the social and economic roots of urban inequality in Africa has remained a thorny issue in African political economy. Stripped to its bare essentials, the critical questions are who causes urban inequality, what causes it, and how it is caused? While all different, the questions are interrelated. Answering the “who causes inequality” question requires a related analysis of what and why, and that is connected to the how question. Indeed, the how question has two parts—how inequality is caused and how it can be addressed. Both are connected to the why question and to its resolution. Unfortunately, while studies about urban inequality abound, they tend to hive off one aspect or another of the tripartite questions on inequality and, even worse, they study the three questions separately. This article tries to overcome the existing atomistic and piecemeal approach to the study of urban inequality in Africa by contextualizing the work of Jane Jacobs and Henry George, who took a holistic view of urban inequality. It argues that Jacobsianism and Georgism have much to offer in terms of understanding urban inequality in Africa, but neither analysis goes far enough to be able to serve as a solid foundation for policy. Ultimately, it is in their approach to urban analysis—the emphasis on context, on actual urban problems, inductivism, and some of their mechanisms for change such as George's land tax and cautious abstraction, in that order, along with their combined vision—which I call “diversity in equality”—that can add to the insights of postcolonialism in understanding and transforming urban inequality in Africa.     

Delivering Flagship Projects in an Era of Regulatory Capitalism: State‐led Privatization and the London Olympics 2012

Much of the urban studies literature on the London Olympics has focused on its social legacies and the top‐down nature of policy agendas. This article explores one element that has been less well covered — the contractual dynamics and delivery networks that have shaped infrastructure provision. Drawing on interviews and freedom of information requests, this article explores the mechanisms involved in the project's delivery and their implications for broader understandings of urban politics and policymaking. It assesses contemporary writings on regulatory capitalism, public–private networks and new contractual spaces to frame the empirical discussion. This article argues that the London Olympic model has been characterized by the prioritization of delivery over representative democracy. Democratic imperatives, such as those around sustainability and employment rights, have been institutionally re‐placed and converted into contractual requirements on firms. This form of state‐led privatization of the development process represents a new, and for some, potentially more effective mode of governance than those offered by traditional systems of regulation and management.     

Assisted Self-help Housing in Mexico: Advocacy, (Micro)Finance and the Making of Markets

This article examines forms of housing finance that offer poor households opportunities for sourcing resources for construction work through non-mortgage microloans. In Mexico, these housing microfinance schemes have recently been incorporated into national housing policies. On a global level, the past 10 to 15 years have seen the emergence of institutional investment in microfinance. I reflect on these processes in this article by bringing critical accounts of financial inclusion in development studies and the debate on financialization within urban studies and beyond into dialogue. I combine micro- and macro-scale perspectives to examine how households become financial clients and how finance gains influence by expanding capitalist markets into the informal housing sector. This discussion is based on policy review and document analyses and an empirically grounded account of an assisted self-help housing case study. In the article I draw on three focal concepts—risk, debt and marketization—to highlight the ambivalences of the expanded access to finance for poor households engaged in self-organized building practices. These ambivalences emerge from the multiplicity of operational logics and motivations in the field of housing provision for the poor, and the profoundly conflicting rationalities of financial- and social-sector actors.     

The Symbiosis of the Urban and the Political

Historically, the urban was the condition of possibility for the political, but the symbiosis of the two has been concealed by the rise of the state and the concomitant development of the social sciences. The effort to recover the connection by denoting a separate domain of ‘urban politics’ is self‐defeating, because it re‐instantiates an ontology of the political that consigns the urban to the domain of ‘low’ politics. The dominant ontology suggests that ‘high’ politics — the most serious politics or politics proper — is always in the domain of states and empires, and that everything else is subject to it. This view is constantly reaffirmed by the political theory that underpins the state system and the modern social sciences. Nevertheless, a different ontology of the political is always already implicit in the concept of the city, understood as a local phenomenon and a global way of life. To see the political through the city is to notice how proximate diversity stimulates self‐organization and self‐government, generates politics in and between authorities in different registers, and defers the sovereignty claims it produces. On this view, the urban is neither high nor low, but is instead the very form of the political, encompassing states and empires as much as anything else.     

Playing with the Rules of the Game: Social Innovation for Urban Transformation

Innovation is perhaps the buzzword in local economic development policy. Associated narrowly with neoliberal ideas, conventional notions of innovation—like its capitalocentric counterparts, enterprise and entrepreneurialism—may promise higher productivity, global competitiveness and technological progress but do not fundamentally change the ‘rules of the game’. In contrast, an emerging field reimagines social innovation as disruptive change in social relations and institutional configurations. This article explores the conceptual and political differences within this pre‐paradigmatic field, and argues for a more transformative understanding of social innovation. Building on the work of David Graeber, I mobilize the novel constructs of ‘play’ and ‘games’ to advance our understanding of the contradictory process of institutionalizing social innovation for urban transformation. This is illustrated through a case study of Liverpool, where diverse approaches to innovation are employed in attempts to resolve longstanding socio‐economic problems. Dominant market‐ and state‐led economic development policies—likened to a ‘regeneration game’—are contrasted with more experimental, creative, democratic and potentially more effective forms of social innovation, seeking urban change through playing with the rules of the game. I conclude by considering how the play–game dialectic illuminates and reframes the way transformative social innovation might be cultivated by urban policy, the contradictions this entails, and possible ways forward.     

Silence and Voice in Nigeria's Hybrid Urban Water Markets: Implications for Local Governance of Public Goods

This article highlights how the governance of the water sector affects the strategies and tactics urban residents use to gain improved access to water for household consumption in cities with limited networked infrastructure. A framework of exit, voice and loyalty (EVL) is used to characterize the actions household decision makers take in neighborhoods across metropolitan areas. In Nigeria, Lagos and Benin City are rapidly growing metropolitan regions with urban water markets competing with a state‐run utility. Scholars have documented informality and hybridity between state and non‐state actors, but there is less understanding of variables associated with citizen behavior in urban water markets across different types of households and communities. This article places Nigeria in the context of African mobilization around water provision, using interviews, observation and findings from fieldwork, household interviews and surveys undertaken between 2008 and 2015 to show how access to water is shaped by the interplay between state and non‐state sources of water. This access is filtered through differently regulated service providers and the perceived authority of each actor involved in water delivery, which can lead to what I call structural silence. Findings show the need for a grounded understanding of factors influencing voice and participation in local governance.     

Global Urban Policymaking in Africa: A View from Angola Through the Redevelopment of the Bay of Luanda

A burgeoning literature looks into the processes and actors involved in the adoption and emulation of best practices and models of urban policy and development across the globe, often with the aim of attracting investment and making cities more competitive. With its focus on leisure, tourism and global capital, the redevelopment of the Bay of Luanda, in the capital of Angola, echoes the rhetoric, policies and projects underpinning such practices. Yet, a deeper interrogation reveals that the redevelopment forms part of a predominantly inward‐looking project driven by the highest echelons of the national government and its ruling party. While these actors mimic and appropriate the language and tools of entrepreneurial cities, their aim is not necessarily to make the city more internationally competitive but to achieve domestic political legitimacy and stability. The argument presented in this article builds on McCann's ( 2013 ) call for scholars to also consider the ‘introspective’ politics of urban policy boosterism from the perspective of a context in which power is highly centralized. The article thus contributes to a growing literature that advances more adequate and provincialized theorizations of urban policy and city governance in the global South, with a particular focus on the African context.     

Government and governance: The value of project management in the public sector

Governance is an emerging theme that has been associated in the public sector with a real political need to satisfy stakeholders by demonstrating accountability and transparency while effectively implementing policy. Many initiatives relating to governance are generated by a need for improvement of organizational performance and ability to implement and adapt to change. These generally take the form of projects and programs encouraging a variety of project management implementations in the public sector. This article reports on examination of the expectations and realization of value from investment in project management in four Australian public‐sector organizations with particular reference to the government context, the perspective of public value management (PVM), and the support that project management provides in meeting the demands of public‐sector governance.     

The Urban,Politics and Subject Formation

In contrast to more traditional debates about voting patterns, local versus state administrations, and individual rights and participatory democracy, this article addresses the question of urban politics through an analysis of subject formation. By taking subject formation as the analytical focus, research questions about ‘politics’ shift from traditional ones about local or state government and the development of consensus, for instance, to ones about the constitution of subjects who are governed and govern themselves in particular ways. Using the emergence of two increasingly commonplace subject forms in contemporary China — urban professionals and volunteers — as examples, the article considers how modes of self‐regulation become political problems and also how subjects may be of the urban as well as located in the urban. The problematizations of socialist state planning have led to new governmental rationalities and technologies that not only produced new subject positions, but also new urban spaces, landscapes, economies and lifestyles. From this view, the article is an intervention into discussions about the ‘where’ of urban politics. It also argues that it is critical to examine politics as problematization and normalization if we are to understand what is at stake in the constitution of potential ‘communities of action’.     

How Did Finance Capital Infiltrate the World of the Urban Poor? Homeownership and Social Fragmentation in a Spanish Neighborhood

When working‐class localities in developed countries are in question, social fragmentation is often analyzed along ethnic lines. Instead, this article claims that it is more critically fruitful to explore fragmentation in terms of people's relations with the state and different forms of capital. It does this by considering housing in Spain as a key resource that connects state policies both with the forms of reproduction and (dis)organization of the disadvantaged, and with the development of real estate and finance capital. First, it unfolds the historical formation of the Spanish ‘homeownership culture’ and the construction–finance complex. Second, starting from an in‐depth ethnography of a peripheral neighborhood in Barcelona, it emphasizes the embeddedness of recent financialization in the livelihood strategies of poor households. Finally, it shows how the process led to a commodification and erosion of those social relations on which it partially depended, thereby exposing problems for class reproduction and fracture lines among the urban poor.     

Scalar Narratives in Bilbao: A Cultural Politics of Scales Approach to the Study of Urban Policy

In this article I explore how theoretical metaphors about the contemporary rescaling of the capitalist economy are used by local policy actors to justify an entrepreneurial urban policy. I develop a new theoretical concept (scalar narrative), suggest an analytical approach (cultural politics of scales) and give evidence of a particular case (Bilbao). The article is structured in the following way. First, I briefly review the literature on politics of scales and contribute to the debate with an approach that incorporates elements from cultural political economy and interpretative policy analysis. Within this approach I mobilize the concept of ‘scalar narrative’ that has already been suggested in the literature but not fully explored. I then put this approach into practice with a particular case study, Bilbao, a city in the north of Spain, which has recently gone through extensive urban regeneration, where I describe the appropriation of three scalar narratives by the policymakers. To show this I draw from empirical work done in Bilbao that looks at statutory and strategic planning documents as well as urban marketing literature and interviews with key informants.     

Problematizing Urban Shit(ting): Representing Human Waste as a Problem

Shit(ting) as a problem is not an a priori position. It is made a problem through socially mediated discursive and non‐discursive practices. Problematizations of human waste promoted by formal governance institutions have dominated the conversation, while the ways in which slum residents experience shit(ting) as a problem receive considerably less attention. This article examines how human waste and its attendant practices are represented as a problem in Agra, India. Using Foucauldian‐based analysis, this research makes visible problematizations of urban shit(ting) and exposes the divergent logics employed by urban actors. Ethnographic interviews and document analysis reveal six ways in which various actors experience shit(ting) as a problem—as: (1) inconvenient; (2) dangerous; (3) contagion; (4) undignified; (5) polluting; (6) primitive. Inconvenience was the problematization invoked most frequently by slum residents, but never by governance groups, meaning that issues of inconvenience were absent from formal planning processes. This absence can, in part, be attributed to the toilet's ability to address multiple problems simultaneously. Findings from this research support the call to acknowledge the situatedness of urban inquiry through analysis of problematizations. In doing so, scholars and practitioners gain access to a more complete toolkit for developing and evaluating urban sewage initiatives.     

Citizen Participation in Urban Governance in the Context of Democratization: Evidence from Low‐Income Neighbourhoods in Mexico

Participation has recently been subject to renewed attention and critique in the context of neoliberal urban governance. This is especially relevant in countries where decentralization and democratization in the context of neoliberalism have led to increased promotion of local‐level participation. This article suggests that current critiques of participation's potential for democratic citizen engagement in a neoliberal context would benefit from further reflection on how participation is implemented in contexts, particularly the global South, where neoliberalism and democracy may be understood differently. Different ‘cultures of engagement’ in specific settings suggest that understandings and practices of participation draw on different traditions, including corporatism and self‐help. This article seeks to add to the debate by exploring the socio‐spatial consequences of participation structures in low‐income neighbourhoods in a provincial Mexican city. Based on qualitative research in two low‐income neighbourhoods in Xalapa, Mexico, it examines how the provisions of the local citizen‐participation framework compare with residents' experiences of it. Formalized conceptions of participation, framed as involvement in service provision, interact with and shape residents' activities in developing their neighbourhoods. This has consequences for urban development there, including the reflection and reproduction of social and spatial marginalization.