Jonathan Silver

1. Across the planet the rapid proliferation of infrastructure corridors is transforming territories around new logistic circulations and economic geographies through processes of ‘corridorisation’...

But we don't know, it could come back because it is a government project and you know when the government wants to do something, they will do it at all means. You will protest, you will go head-to-...

This review critically engages with Gareth Bryant and Sophie Webber’s Climate Finance: Taking a Position on Climate Futures . It contends that there are two unwritten themes that operate across the text that are important to the analytical framework and the operations of climate finance itself. Firstly, a dialectic of multiple forms of uncertainty around climate change (finance) and the attempts to contain, navigate and accumulate across these geographies. Secondly, the need to take seriously the intersections of geo-politics and climate finance amid the increasing multipolarity of the world system.

Corridors, inscriptions, and urban studies careers. Caitlin takes to the streets of Manchester with local Jon Silver, discussing the trajectory of urban theorising between Norths and Souths. Jon expertly navigates us, in practice and in personal reflection, through Manchester and many Southern settings of his work, with a close eye to urban infrastructure and questions […]

The territorial and technological geographies of the planet are being rapidly and profoundly transformed and restructured in the 21st century. A massive surge of plans, visions, and investments is materializing through new connectivity infrastructure and operations of vast, extended transportation and logistical networks, with the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative serving as a prominent example. To scrutinize this context, in this article, we advocate for a shift from infrastructure-led development to infrastructure-led urbanization, emphasizing the urban as the key analytical terrain. We argue that the urban perspective reveals conceptual, geoeconomic, and geopolitical dimensions that are at the core of the transformations brought about by the implementation of global infrastructure. By mobilizing the authors’ urban research experience spanning Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America, and by stressing the vital value of on-the-ground and comparative research, we illustrate the complexities and specificities inherent in these projects. In doing so, we propose a collective dialogue that explores and reorients conceptual and methodological possibilities to capture the complex interplay of geoeconomic and geopolitical forces within what we term ‘global infrastructure-led urbanization’.

Corridors entail and promote pervasive logics of (dis)connectivity. Over the years, corridors have become increasingly predominant across a range of spaces, places and territories. Their prevalence reflects a critical global shift in planning approaches, urban-regional governance, investment trends, circulation regimes and broader urbanisation processes. This article engages with this paradigm shift to critically interrogate the term corridor and its various usages and dynamics, considering its analytical purchase and socio-spatial dynamic for urban studies. We provide a genealogical reading of the term corridor, examining its usage and conceptualisation in different contexts, to ask what these different interpretations and analytical functions of the corridor can offer to urban studies today. Through this critical review, we assert that the meaning and usage of corridors are permeated by heterogeneity and multiplicity that define their current dynamic. This leads us to problematise their linear delineations across space (and time). Thereafter, we offer a typology of different corridors, which helps us to address its analytical valence for urban studies and social science. We conclude by setting out four research directions in scholarship that offer a platform to develop further research imperatives and debates in relation to the growing urban corridorisation and its effects on urbanities, cities and everyday life.

What might you hear if you speak to a resident about urban planning in a neighbourhood somewhere in North America or Western Europe that has experienced intensive deindustrialization and austerity? They may well tell you about incessant waves of demolition and displacement, degraded infrastructure services or the shattering of various forms of social infrastructure that hold communities together. From massive slum clearances from the 19th century onwards to the surging gentrification gripping many communities today, urban planning has been perceived by many of these residents as in service to the needs of capital and the state, rather than the well-being of the community. Similar opinion is also to be found in the rapidly urbanizing spaces of many cities in the Global South, even as they are under somewhat different processes of urbanization than those in the North. Such ill-feeling towards urban planning, which I myself have regularly encountered in many different neighbourhoods across a myriad of cities, rubs up against the self-perception of the discipline and profession of town planning.

Over the last decade, Greater Manchester's city-regional centre has become an important site for build to rent (BTR) housing development in the UK. The growth of this new tenure raises important empirical and conceptual questions about how far and through what means BTR has extended in post-industrial cities like Manchester, as well as how to theorise the global–local relations involved in BTR development. Drawing on a self-built database of 155 development projects incorporating 45,069 new housing units, we show that new-build BTR units have outpaced ‘build to sell’ (BTS) units almost two to one in Manchester's city-regional centre since 2012. We also found stronger international investment in BTR relative to BTS, illustrating BTR's more globalised and financialised form. Our paper understands BTR growth in Manchester as the outcome of a transcalar territorial network – an assemblage of national policy objectives, local state actors’ urban regeneration activity and heterogenous global investor groups with different priorities all seeking a return. We highlight the important role of national and local state subsidies and local authority joint ventures in constructing a territory conducive for BTR investment in Manchester. We also show how the fungibility of BTR assets as a ‘networked product’ widens the investment appeal of the tenure type, broadening and deepening housing financialization.