Fixing urban infrastructure in the London global city-region, undermining the rest of the UK?

The London global city-region’s political-economic dominance in the UK as the main engine of national economic growth and tax revenue generation underpins its integral role in generating and reproducing geographical inequalities in city infrastructure provision. A spatially skewed national infrastructure narrative and imperative have been constructed and articulated by national and London city-region statecraft with financial institutions. Infrastructure fixes devised by international, national and city actors are mixing entrepreneurialism, financialism and managerialism in attempts to resolve the capital’s growth constraints. The resulting scale and increasing cost burden upon the UK and city-regional state and markedly uneven national distribution of public resources risks undermining national state aims for spatial rebalancing. Other cities in the UK face intense financial constraints under austerity with limited decentralised powers and resources to address their city infrastructure needs, fuelling geographical inequalities across the UK.