Forging glocal governance? Urban infrastructure as networked financial products

2 Forging glocal governance? Urban infrastructures as networked financial products Abstract. Urban infrastructure provisions are increasingly shifting from public good to private property, becoming financial products, with cities and regions valued merely on a quarter-to-quarter basis. My argument in this paper is threefold. I argue that the urban infrastructure landscape is undergoing financialization. Additionally, building on Graham and Marvin (2001) who describe how infrastructure networks are being unbundled locally, I argue that these unbundled infrastructures are simultaneously being interlinked internationally via specialist global infrastructure funds. Third, with the opening up to international infrastructure capital, non-local owners, through abiding to contractual obligations, play an increasing role in the governance of infrastructure projects at the urban scale: a ‘glocal ’ form of governance is developing. I illustrate these arguments by investigating the case of the privatised toll-road 407 in the Greater Toronto Area, where the leading investment bank in the field of ‘infrastructure ’ is one of the global owners. With increased used of the international norms of commercial law and the fluctuating cycle of local, national and supranational politics, a toll-pricing controversy ha