Introduction: The financialisation of urban production: Conditions, mediations and transformations

Abstract

A distinctive feature of urban spaces lies in their high infrastructural density. Because buildings, roads, stadiums, airports are all capital-intensive, they rely in turn on financial infrastructures that circulate not passengers, power or data, but capital more or less temporarily fixed in the urban built environment (Harvey, 2001). Like many infrastructures (Edwards, 2003), financial ones remain invisible to most but for cases of major disruptions. Think, for instance, of how the subprime crisis revealed the interconnection between households’ mortgages and capital markets. This relative invisibility should, however, not obfuscate the importance of financial circuits in the design, construction, exploitation and ownership of the urban built environment (‘urban production’ from here on). Researchers in urban studies unevenly pay attention to financial circuits, understood here as the sociotechnical systems that channel investments in the forms of equity and debt into urban production. Major accounts of city-making under neoliberalisation from the 1990s and 2000s are a case in point. Such studies mainly focus on evolving rationales for public intervention and the resulting changes in public actors’ modes of operation where welfare provision gives way to entrepreneurial policies (Harvey, 1989; Moulaert et al., 2003; Tasan-Kok and Baeten, 2012); the growing importance of private investments and the concomitant reconfiguration of public spending is mostly acknowledged as a contextual factor, while the ‘private investors’ and ‘international finance capital’ targeted by public authorities remain in the background of analyses. There is thus a dearth of conceptualisation and of evidence on how private financiers and investors, collectively or individually, shape or adjust to this new context and on the role played by those acting at the interface between public and private bodies. It is thus important to go beyond simplistic analytical distinctions, such as ‘public subsidies’ versus ‘private investments’ and to scrutinise financial circuits as relevant …