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This thesis examines how urban infrastructure is funded and financed in cities in the United Kingdom and the United States. The thesis brings together the diverse and disconnected literatures on infrastructure, capital investment and urban development and creates a framework for understanding the changing landscape of infrastructure finance. Drawing on primary empirical research, this framework is then used to examine the funding and financing of infrastructure in the cities of Manchester, Newcastle and Sheffield in the UK and Buffalo, NY, Chicago, IL, and Stockton, CA in the US. The objectives of the empirical analysis are: to explain the types of funding and financing being used within the case study cities and to identify emergent trends; to understand the multiscalar factors driving the adoption and use of those practices; to analyse the key mechanisms, processes and systems that are implicit in a range of capital investment strategies; and to explain the implications of the ways in which infrastructure is funded and financed for urban development within the case study cities. This thesis argues that the practices used for funding and financing infrastructure in cities are becoming increasingly financialised, and that this is having transformative implications for the urban environment. As such, the thesis makes four main contributions; first, it demonstrates how the process of financialisation is changing the ways in which infrastructure is funded and financed; second, it shows that financialisation is changing the politics of infrastructure and fuelling a process of reterritorialisation but, at the same time, that the state continues to have a major role in the funding and financing of infrastructure; third, it contends that the financialisation of capital investment is encouraged by instances of fiscal stress, and yet that it can also catalyse overaccumulation and cause further fiscal crisis; and fourth, it suggests that increasingly financialised models of infrastructure investment are reinforcing patterns of uneven development and causing an intensification in the process of urban splintering. More broadly, this research begins to address a gap in the literature on financialisation, which, to date, has been criticised for lacking sufficiently in-depth and fine-grained analyses of financial actors, markets and systems. In particular, the empirical evidence and comparative case study analysis illustrates that financialisation is not an overpowering and all-consuming behemoth but a highly variable process that is negotiated, managed and regulated in different ways in different geographical contexts.

In this thesis I investigate the narrative rendering of urban experiences and the place of agency within these renderings, looking in particular at the personal stories of urban dwellers. Grounded in anthropological fieldwork in Britain - in the town of Romford (Essex) to the east of London - but also relying on written sources on British social realities, this thesis challenges the idea and practice of a traditional place-based ethnography, calling in turn for an anthropological appreciation of the individual writing of human experience. This I define as the considered ordering of the forms in terms of which individuals experience their lives. I recognise that such ‘writing', conceived as a cognitive pursuit, is possible within speech and not, as some may have it, the exclusive preserve of literary culture. In allowing that individuals may exercise authorship over their lives in this way, I find it is possible, as well as potentially illuminating, to compare individuals' writings, their personal accounts of their lives, with other genres for writing the reality of urban and peri-urban milieux in Britain. I hear significant correspondences between each story-genre, especially as regards the impacts of town planning on urban space for the populations that inhabit it, and discuss the possible theoretical implications of this correspondence. I focus extensively on two such genres in addition to personal stories: the sociological - examining Michael Young and Peter Willmott's sociological classic text ‘Family and Kinship in East London' - and the literary - a reading of the work of English poet and journalist John Betjeman. Running through the thesis is also an appreciation of the figure of the amateur, both as a real actor and as a metaphor for the postmodernist approach to culture to which I also subscribe.

Urban infrastructure is the key physical asset for successful functioning of modern cities. Yet the building and maintaining infrastructure networks require robust institutions, either expressed explicitly in rules and regulations or implicitly in social norms and mutual expectations, which are crucial for governing the complex relationships among all stakeholders including governments, regulators, investors, utilities and consumers that underpin the production of infrastructure services. Although there are more and more studies focusing on infrastructure, the underlying institutions that sustain the 'sink' of long-term accumulation of finance, technology, organisational and geopolitical power for shaping urban landscape have often been neglected. In particular, few studies have investigated the uneven geographical phenomenon of urban infrastructure investment and governance. As such, this thesis compares and explores how and why political, institutional and governance frameworks in Beijing and London influence urban water infrastructure investment and service delivery differently. The findings from the comparative study of the thesis should assist better understanding of 'variegated capitalism', especially state capitalism versus liberal capitalism. Through case study and close dialogue methodology, this thesis compares and investigates the investment models, governance frameworks, pricing systems and infrastructure contracts for urban water infrastructure in Beijing and London from the perspective of economic geography. Based on the theories of institutional and relational economic geography, this thesis organizes the study into four substantive chapters: Chapter Three compares the investment models employed in Beijing and London for water infrastructure investment and the underlying institutions; Chapter Four explores the effects of different governance frameworks on urban water infrastructure investment and service delivery in Beijing and London; Chapter Five investigates the effects of different pricing systems in the two cities for coordinating the intrinsic, market and investment value of urban water infrastructure; Chapter Six analyses different infrastructure contracts for financing large-scale water infrastructure projects in the two cities. The thesis finds that institutions are embedded in time and space for harnessing the flows of capital and producing the configurations of infrastructure provision, thus shaping the heterogeneous landscape of the material, economic, social and geopolitical fabric of contemporary cities. Therefore, in contrast to the statement 'form follows function', this thesis argues that infrastructure functions are inherently geographical in nature. The thesis has made the following contributions: firstly, it has compared the various trajectories of urban water infrastructure investment and governance in different political economic contexts, especially the dialogue between Global North and South, making original contribution in the 'geography of infrastructure'; secondly, the thesis employs cases studies to compare and investigate institutions empirically - issues that have been neglected for much too long in mainstream economic geography, contributing to 'variegated capitalism'; finally, in practical terms this research provides information for governments, regulators, investors, infrastructure providers and other stakeholders on in-depth understanding of urban water infrastructure investment and governance in different institutional and relational contexts.