The financialising local growth machine in Chicago

Abstract

In this article, we explore how global infrastructure investment funds and actors are financialising the local growth machine in Chicago, and how Chicago’s transforming growth machine uses its influence to financialise urban governance policy goals and institutional arrangements. We view global infrastructure investors through the lens of place entrepreneurs seeking to extract monopoly rents from urban infrastructure. As place entrepreneurs, global infrastructure investors have an interest in forming alliances with other place entrepreneurs to generate political and institutional capacity for infrastructure financialisation. Our case study examines the concrete and specific ways in which global financial firms and actors work in partnership with Chicago’s business civic organisation, World Business Chicago, to shape the City of Chicago’s planning processes and orchestrate a more mature institutional-regulatory infrastructure investment environment through the formation of the Chicago Infrastructure Trust, the city’s public–private partnership infrastructure bank.