Proposing a more people-oriented approach to answering the question of 'What kind of urban infrastructure, and for whom?', this book addresses the struggles of national and local governments to fund, finance and govern urban infrastructure. It develops new insights to explain the socially and spatially uneven mixing of managerial, entrepreneurial and financialised city governance in austerity and limited decentralisation across England. As urban infrastructure fixes for the London global city-region risk undermining national 'rebalancing' efforts in the UK, city statecraft in the rest of the country is having uneasily to combine speculation, risk-taking and prospective venturing with co-ordination, planning and regulation.

This book will be of interest to researchers and scholars in the fields of business and management, economics, geography, planning, and political science. Its conclusions will be valuable to policymakers and practitioners in both the public and private sectors seeking insights into the intersections of financialisation, decentralisation and austerity in the UK, Europe and globally.