Conclusions

How city infrastructure is owned, paid for and run for people and places are concerns for urban and regional development, politics and policies internationally. Understanding financialisation helps explain its engagements with city infrastructure and its funding, financing and governing. Financialisation is a socially and spatially variegated process. City statecraft involves the mixing and mutating of governing forms, practices and arrangements in certain times, spaces and institutions. The local state is both object and agent of financialisation. Financialising city statecraft and infrastructure ramifications reverberate over the longer term, reaching beyond cities and city-regions into national and sub-national political-economies. The politics of financialising city statecraft and infrastructure demonstrate political-economic accommodations, uneven investment geographies and rewired accountabilities. Normative and political concerns pose the questions: what kind of city statecraft and infrastructure and for whom? A people-oriented perspective raises the prospect of “de-financialised†and alternative, collective and sustainable ways of funding, financing and governing urban infrastructure.