IntroductionPublic transportation, as one crucial component of a city's transportation network, enables the mobility and flow of people and goods that make cities livable. Public transportation plays a vital role in the urban economy in that it creates place-based advantages, facilitates the circulation of capital, and attracts investment in local real estate markets. At the level of everyday lived experience, public transit shapes and constrains opportunity (time it takes to access jobs, schools, and services) and sociospatial relations into the built environment. In many places, public transportation is also wielded as an instrument of power, dominance, and social control, entrenching the privileges of the affluent and the disadvantages of working people into the built environment (Graham and Marvin, 2001). Therefore, trends in public transportation infrastructure and service levels constitute one dimension of uneven geographical development in urban areas. My research considers the ways in which neoliberalism and global city building are shaping new patterns of uneven geographic development in the public transit sector by focusing on public transportation planning and investment in the city of Chicago. The purpose of my paper is to contribute to the scholarship on the politics of infrastructure (Keil and Young, 2008;McFarlane and Rutherford, 2008) emphasizing the ways in which infrastructure and cities are produced and transformed together in a global context as well as how these processes contribute to urban fragmentation and inequality.The second part of this paper positions my study in the literature on entrepreneurial urban governments, neoliberal public transportation projects, and emerging sociospatial relations of inclusion and exclusion in the global city. The third part examines public transportation planning and new construction projects taking place in the city of Chicago in order to illustrate the impact of neoliberalization on the geography of uneven public transportation development. The narrative was assembled through a combination of documents produced by government, transit and planning agencies, secondary sources (mostly journalistic materials and documents produced by nonprofit groups), interviews, and nonparticipant observation of community meetings. My investigation of Chicago's

Although the benefits o f infrastructure public-private partnerships are widely promoted, the public has little understanding o f the new forms o f risk and risk management obligations that city governments often absorb in infrastructure leasing concession agreements. This paper examines the City o f Chicago's parking meter lease agreement with Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners. Risk reduction mechanisms embedded in the contract resulted in the city absorbing new costs and risks that negatively impacted city finances and remade the local state as a risk manager tasked with responsibilities that protect the rate of return o f the global infrastructure investment fund. New planning and fiscal risks work as obstacles for transportation planners altering current street-level transportation configurations. Interviews with transportation planners revealed the new barriers put in place to safeguard financial investment that planners must navigate in order to realize environmentally sustainable and innovative street-level transportation planning.

What factors do administrators consider when (dis)investing in public facilities? We model school closure decisions in Chicago from 2003 to 2013 with multinomial logit models that estimate the decision to close or “turnaround” schools as a function of building, student, geographic, political, and neighborhood factors during two mayoral administrations. The results from our specifications validate the “official” rationale for closures and turnarounds: Low test scores are associated with closures and turnarounds under Mayor Daley, and underutilization is associated with closures under Mayor Emanuel. However, our findings also reveal some distance between technical-rational decision making and the realities of capital budgeting under austerity. The race of students and proximity to both the Central Business District and charter schools also predicted closures. This suggests multiple, potentially conflicting, interests that school districts balance to serve the needs of school-age populations and taxpayers and also the potential for burdening already vulnerable populations with the negative effects of disinvestment.

The article examines how the entrepreneurial municipal government in Chicago, IL has deployed tax increment financing revenues to realize so-called urban education reform through the construction of exclusive neoliberal schools. At the same time traditional open enrollment schools are relatively deprived of tax increment financing revenues for school construction projects. In effect, Chicago’s municipal government is allotted the financial flexibility by the tax increment financing program to construct a variegated, unequal and polarized school system consisting of well funded, high quality exclusive public schools and underfunded, lower quality open enrollment public schools. Further, the placement of exclusive schools is also polarized as prestigious selective enrollment public schools are located in high socio-economic neighborhoods and partially privatized charter and contract schools, outside of local democratic control, are located in predominantly African-American low socio-economic neighborhoods, thus disempowering these residents.

In this article, we explore how global infrastructure investment funds and actors are financialising the local growth machine in Chicago, and how Chicago’s transforming growth machine uses its influence to financialise urban governance policy goals and institutional arrangements. We view global infrastructure investors through the lens of place entrepreneurs seeking to extract monopoly rents from urban infrastructure. As place entrepreneurs, global infrastructure investors have an interest in forming alliances with other place entrepreneurs to generate political and institutional capacity for infrastructure financialisation. Our case study examines the concrete and specific ways in which global financial firms and actors work in partnership with Chicago’s business civic organisation, World Business Chicago, to shape the City of Chicago’s planning processes and orchestrate a more mature institutional-regulatory infrastructure investment environment through the formation of the Chicago Infrastructure Trust, the city’s public–private partnership infrastructure bank.

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Our fiscal analysis of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) from 1990 to 2018 contributes to a growing scholarship on the financialization of urban governance. We advance the concept of 'recursive austerity' to show how devolution and cuts at higher scales push local governments into the hands of both growth and debt machines. The use of short-term and variable-rate debt to pay for capital projects causes entrepreneurial and austerity strategies to chafe against their limitations and contradictions, which begets more austerity and structural dependence on credit markets. Faced with deficits, CPS undertook crippling austerity measures, such as staffing cuts, pension holidays and school closures, which disproportionately harmed Black students, households, teachers and neighborhoods. We explain how CPS moved from a voluntary high-leverage strategy to finance capital projects to endemic debt dependency, characterized by habitual borrowing to refinance old loans and sustain operations. We argue that CPS's debt trap and recurring budget 'crises' are the outcomes of the fiscal management decisions it made with investment banks and the City of Chicago, and not only the result of secular trends such as declining enrollments.