Capture and control: two intersecting logics of infrastructure finance

This chapter examines historic shifts resulting in tighter couplings between urban infrastructural systems and the ‘topologies’ of global financial markets (Pryke and Allen, 2019). By positioning infrastructural capacity as the product of an apparatus of capture characteristic of the modern fiscal state, it traces the shift from state to corporate-financial sovereignty over public works that has resulted in a process of instrumentation of the city by (private) financial devices and their associated abstract logics. The chapter develops this framework through engagement with the example of the Chicago Skyway, the financial trajectory of which offers a lens into the financing apparatuses that have operated in U.S. cities since the mid-twentieth century. This provides an opportunity to assess not only how infrastructure finance writ-large orders users, spaces, and flows for capture but also how the forms and logics of capture shift as infrastructure are bound into circuits of global finance.