ABSTRACT

This essay critiques dominant discourses on sustainable urban governance on two grounds. (1) Their limited focus on cities as territorially bounded and separate entities presents a truncated understanding of urbanisation processes that distorts what sustainability means in problematic ways. (2) Because the flows that are crucial in shaping urbanisation processes are not just articulated at the local scale, the definition of urban governance needs to be extended to patterns of state intervention at multiple scales. The concept of infrastructural regimes serves in this essay as a heuristic to understand how the state, in different constellations and degrees of centralization, shapes socio-spatial arrangements to create, stabilize and guarantee the market flows that overdetermine urban development. I discern three infrastructural regimes for the case of the United States to unpack the historically specific, shifting patterns of state intervention. I conclude that debates on urban sustainability, regardless of whether they address the Global South or the Global North, need to be upscaled to map onto these urban realities and to provide a meaningful conceptual language. On a more normative level, given their stakes and leverage in spatial restructuring processes, local governments have the potential to overcome the divisive logics of urban entrepreneurialism and the vicious circle of zero-sum competition for flows of capital, commodities and tourists.