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Abstract
Large-scale urban development projects are a significant format of urban expansion and renewal across the globe. As generators of governance innovation and indicators of the future city in each urban context, large-scale development projects have been interpreted within frameworks of ‘variegations’ of wider circulating processes, such as neoliberalisation or financialisation. However, such projects often entail significant state support and investment, are strongly linked to a wide variety of transnational investors and developers and are frequently highly contested in their local environments. Thus, each project comes to fruition in a distinctive regulatory context, often as an exception to the norm, and each emerges through complex interactions over a long period of time amongst an array of actors. We therefore seek to broaden the discussion from an analytical focus on variegated globalised processes to consider three large-scale urban development projects (in Shanghai, Johannesburg and London) as distinctive (transcalar) territorialisations. Using an innovative comparative approach, we outline the grounds for a systematic analytical conversation across mega-urban development projects in very different contexts. Initially, comparability rests on the shared features of large-scale developments – that they are multi-jurisdictional, involve long time scales and bring significant financing challenges. Comparing three development projects, we are able to interrogate, rather than take for granted, how a range of wider processes, circulating practices, transcalar actors and territorial regulatory formations composed specific urban outcomes in each case. Thinking across these diverse cases provides grounds for rebuilding understandings of urban development politics.
Highlights
The territorial formations of the urban under planetary urbanization imply the need to move beyond a jurisdictional municipal approach to understanding urban development politics - a range of territories, territorialisations and spatial dynamics need to be taken into account (Brenner and Schmid, 2015; Lauermann, 2018; Keil, 2017; Murray, 2017; Kanai and Schindler, 2019; Choplin and Hertzog, 2020)
We find expanded ways to characterise the interests of state actors in urban development; we consider how the need to embed developments in local political contexts amplifies the role of residents and community-based groups in shaping outcomes even where political circumstances for engagement are not propitious; and we observe that the urban development itself is crucial to securing financing, through property taxation, enterprise taxes or planning gain, drawing attention to the “urban land nexus” as a shared feature of urban development (Scott and Storper, 2015)
We are able to identify some features of urban development politics which could speak across the different contexts, allowing us to learn from one context to another, and inspire further interrogation
Summary
The territorial formations of the urban under planetary urbanization (extended, fragmented, sprawling, operational) imply the need to move beyond a jurisdictional municipal approach to understanding urban development politics - a range of territories, territorialisations and spatial dynamics need to be taken into account (Brenner and Schmid, 2015; Lauermann, 2018; Keil, 2017; Murray, 2017; Kanai and Schindler, 2019; Choplin and Hertzog, 2020). We focus on the constitutive spatialities of urban territories and of the actors involved in urbanisation processes, including their transnational reach and flows, institutional formations and lived experiences (Massey, 2005; Halbert and Rouanet, 2014; Allen, 2016; Keil, 2017) This inspires new grounds for composing comparisons and building concepts across the wide diversity of urban experiences, able to start from the fragmented, dispersed and often divergent territorialisations of urbanisation processes rather than comparing “cities”, or configuring an analysis within the conceptual architecture of “scale” (Schmid, 2018; McFarlane 2019). Working across divisions such as national contexts, north-south, or delimited “conjunctures”, and drawing on theoretical repertoires and insights from different contexts, we seek to establish grounds for a comparative urban practice which can more effectively support global urban studies and advance an open approach to conceptualisation across diverse and divergent urban experiences
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