In This Issue...

This issue showcases a prominent theme of changing entrepreneurial urban governance into a finance-dominant regime, or financialized governance. Here, the spatial fixity of land rent imposes both a barrier and an imperative for creating liquidity assets. Or, more broadly, how the urban is treated now creates a new logic of governance. The articles in this issue examine a wide range of instruments and practices: tax increment finance (TIF), public-private partnership (PPP), contract for deed (CFD), council-owned real estate companies set up as special purpose vehicles (SPVs), and private equity financiers. They offer insights on this new mode of governance and significantly advance our understanding of urban entrepreneurialism through more concrete studies of stakeholders and financial operation mechanisms, as shown in the cases of ‘financialized municipal entrepreneurialism’ in council-owned real estate companies in London or municipal land instruments in Sweden. The cases in this issue range across the Canadian province of Ontario, Sofia in Bulgaria, poor neighbourhoods in Atlanta, local governments in Sweden, Lambeth in London, Edinburgh City Council, Spanish cities, and a small city in Central China. All the articles demonstrate, to varying degrees, that the use of these instruments by the state to facilitate urban regeneration has deviated from the initial justification of public interest to involving the financial logic of rent extraction and financial maximization. Another related theme in this issue is policy mobility studies, which show how these new practices of governance may be learnt, adapted and modified across geographical space and scales. All the articles in this issue show methodological sophistication and pay attention to stakeholders, actors, organizations and their roles in governmentalities. They stress particularity in their case studies, for example, career promotion in China linked to land finance, the growth machine and speed of development, and selective definition and adaptation of an EU concept of territorial cohesion.

— Fulong Wu