Forging Glocal Governance? Urban Infrastructures as Networked Financial Products
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Urban infrastructure provisions are increasingly shifting from public good to private property, with cities and regions valued merely on a quarter‐to‐quarter basis. The argument in this article is threefold. The urban infrastructure landscape is undergoing financialization. Additionally, building on Graham and Marvin who describe how infrastructure networks are being unbundled locally, these infrastructures are simultaneously being interlinked internationally via specialist global infrastructure funds. Third, non‐local owners, by abiding by contractual obligations, play an increasing role in the governance of infrastructure projects at the urban scale, and a ‘glocal’ form of governance is developing. These arguments are illustrated by an investigation of the privatized toll road 407 in the Greater Toronto Area, where the leading investment bank in ‘infrastructure’ is one of the global owners. With increased use of the international norms of commercial law and the fluctuating cycle of local, national and supranational politics, a toll‐pricing controversy occurred wherein provincial politics challenged a ‘self‐regulating’ contract encouraging the private owners to increase the toll charges when both the traffic and toll thresholds were met, so as to create congestion relief on this particular road. Road users, provincial and federal Canadian governments, and even the European Union were involved. Résumé La fourniture d’infrastructures urbaines est de plus en plus souvent transférée du domaine public vers le privé, la valeur des villes et régions étant estimée simplement d’un trimestre sur l’autre. L’argumentation de cet article se présente en trois volets : le paysage des infrastructures urbaines connaît une financiarisation ; par ailleurs, dans le prolongement de la description de Graham et Marvin concernant la désintégration locale des réseaux d’infrastructures, ces dernières se trouvent directement liées au niveau mondial via des fonds internationaux spécialisés en infrastructures; enfin, les propriétaires non‐locaux jouent, en respectant les obligations contractuelles, un rôle accru dans la gouvernance des projets d’infrastructure à l’échelle urbaine, ce qui génère une forme ‘glocale’ de gouvernance. Ces propos sont illustrés par une étude sur l’autoroute privée 407 de la banlieue de Toronto, la principale banque d’investissement en ‘infrastructure’ en étant l’un des propriétaires internationaux. Compte tenu de l’application plus fréquente de normes de droit commercial internationales et du cycle fluctuant des politiques locales, nationales et supranationales, la tarification du péage a fait l’objet d’une controverse, la politique provinciale mettant en cause un contrat ‘autorégulateur’ qui encourageait les propriétaires privés à augmenter les péages en fonction de seuils de circulation et de tarifs, de manière à créer un décongestionnement du trafic sur cette autoroute. Les usagers, les gouvernements canadiens provincial et fédéral, et même l’Union européenne, ont été parties prenantes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".