In the 2000s, cities across North America began leasing existing infrastructure to global investment consortia. Previous evaluations of infrastructure leases focus on the lack of transparency of the privatisation process and the terms of the arrangements negotiated by the public sector and the private concessionaires. In this research, we argue that such approaches fall short by failing to investigate the significant repositioning of the local state relative to financial markets produced by their involvement in major asset lease deals. We develop this argument through a case study of the institutional transformation of the City of Chicago, the US’s most aggressive instigator of infrastructure asset leases. Even as the concession agreements seemingly protect the City from the claims of investors, creditors and counterparties and provide it with new powers, they enmesh the City in a set of financial relationships that expose it to liabilities not accounted for in lease agreements and create an institutional bias towards managing the collateral effects of financialisation.
This article presents a critical commentary on the development, through restructuring, of the Chicago economy in the period since the onset of deindustrialization in the early 1980s. Adapting an innovative methodology for the measurement of labor‐market inequalities over time at the metropolitan scale, the article provides an empirical analysis of the city's new mode of growth. A notable feature is an entrenched and deepening pattern of wage inequality in Chicago, which is distinctive from that evident at the national level. Closer attention should be paid to what have proved to be extended processes of economic transformation at the urban scale, the social and geographic contours of which have yet to be adequately mapped.
Participants in the U.S. maker movement generate market-worthy consumer goods from the bare bones of novel ideas and simple production equipment. For cities and policymakers, making thus represents the opportunity to develop new manufacturing industries and employment. For makers to transform themselves into large-volume producers, however, they must negotiate significant financing, production and distribution barriers without recourse to the capabilities of the large manufacturing firm. Drawing on 137 interviews with makers and maker-supporting organizations, we call attention to the challenges of “manufacturing without the firm,” as well as the extent to which the localized institutional ecosystems in which makers are embedded may help them circumvent these challenges. Our findings indicate that the maker movement's generative prospects rest on these firms' ability to negotiate problems of production and markets that have beset clusters of small firms for many decades.
We estimate the probability that a residential building in a gentrifying neighborhood will be demolished, situating the decision within a context of consumer preferences, neighborhood change, and public policy. We perform a logit analysis of address-level data for every privately initiated demolition permit issued in three Chicago community areas between 2000 and 2003. We find that smaller, older, frame buildings with less lot coverage had a greater probability of being demolished during this period. Political jurisdiction and socioeconomic factors, other than the change in Hispanic population, were less important than expected. Demolished structures were located in appreciating areas, further away from Tax Increment Financing districts. We speculate that this popular redevelopment tool has been used in areas with primarily commercial land uses on the periphery of residential neighborhoods and that rent gaps are reduced by the negative externalities associated with conflicting land uses. put the city up; tear the city down put it up again; let us find a city. Carl Sandburg, ''The Windy City''Despite the fact that demolitions remake the urban landscape on a daily basis, little scholarly attention has been directed toward understanding this form of creative destruction. 1 The lack of attention is due partly to the fact that demolitions are rarely treated as an end unto themselves, but more as a prelude to redevelopment or vacant land, both of which have been studied more extensively. As Bender (1979) pointed out, the long-run equilibrium models of housing production favored by economists tend to ignore the shortterm removal of suboptimal stock.The incidence of demolition, however, is important in and of itself. Demolition has the potential to eliminate buildings of historic, cultural, and architectural importance, some of which are viewed as playing a role in maintaining the physical coherence of neighborhoods. To witness an act of demolition is to watch the built environment change shape in
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