How Infrastructure Became an Investment Sector

Abstract

In the past forty years infrastructure provision and operation in advanced nations have been transformed from a sector dominated by state-owned utilities into one characterised by a growing presence of private capital and diverse non-state organisational structures. The chapter shows how these changes not only affect the ways infrastructure steers economic relations within cities, but re-constitutes urban governance in surprising ways.The chapter then explores the theoretical challenges which these trends bring to economic geography. On one hand – when we look to economics – there is growing redundancy of the historical taxonomy of infrastructure and the idea of infrastructure as a public good. One the other – when we look to geography – there is normative obsession with the idea of the state-run utilities system as if no other form of infrastructure provision is capable of generating just and sustainable urban outcomes.The chapter draws eclectically on economic sources to build a functional model of infrastructure analysis as a way forward, an approach that brings together capital, organisational and regulatory structures into a single frame, and demonstrates the theoretical and policy power of such an approach.