When large-scale regeneration becomes an engine of urban growth: How new power coalitions are shaping Milan's governance

Abstract

The overall aim of this paper is to discuss how, and the extent to which, the entrance of financial players in urban development affects the governance of the city. To this aim, we focus on Milan, a fast-globalising city that has recently opened its real estate market to transnational capital investors, and we zoom in on two flagship projects, Porta Nuova and CityLife, both symbols of the entrepreneurial agenda adopted in the early 2000s. While investigating these empirical cases, we aim to put in conversation urban regime analysis and the literature on the financialisation of urban development, by theorising the relationship between capital and the state. In contexts such as Milan, where local governments face increasingly reliance on local revenues from urban transformation, the main priority is to anchor investments and create a good business environment for increasingly mobile capital. At the same time, capital actors’ strategies depend on specific localised political and economic advantages that the state has to provide. We thus argue that power relations are shaped by the mutual dependence between the local state and capital investors. We conclude that it is precisely this relationship of mutual dependence that accounts for how urban governance is being restructured today, in a way that makes it financialised or more formally dependent on financial capital.