There has been growing interest in the expansion of global investment in urban areas, and the financialisation of urban development, both of which bring new business logics into the production of the built environment and shape urban outcomes. At the same time, mega urban projects have continued and spread as a significant format of urban expansion and renewal, often strongly linked to transnational investors and developers. Nonetheless, the distinctive regulatory and political contexts within which transnational actors must bring such projects to fruition matter greatly to outcomes, with territorialised governance arrangements both shaping and being shaped by transnational dynamics. However, there has been little systematic comparative consideration of these diverse regulatory contexts in their own right, rather than as contributors to wider circulating processes such as neoliberalisation. As a result, the implications of different regulatory regimes for urban outcomes have not been effectively assessed. In this paper we therefore broaden the discussion from globalised processes of “financialisation” to consider three large-scale urban development projects from the perspective of their distinctive “business models”, including their place in achieving wider strategic objectives at national and metropolitan scales, their agile and often bespoke institutional configurations, and their different forms of financing, taxation and land value capture. Our cases are Lingang, Shanghai (one of nine planned satellite cities), the Corridors of Freedom project in Johannesburg (a linear transport oriented development seeking to integrate the racially divided city), and Old Oak and Park Royal in north-west London (under a mayoral development corporation, associated with significant new metropolitan and national transport investments). We observe that the business models adopted, notably in relation to financial calculations and income streams associated with the developments, are a result of strongly path dependent formats of governance and income generation in each case. However we want to move beyond seeing these as residual, as contingent and contextual to wider accounts of urban development focussed on globalised financial flows and calculations. Using a comparative approach we initiate a systematic analytical conversation about the implications of different business models for the form and socio-economic potential of mega-urban development projects.

人们对扩大城市地区的全球投资和城市发展的金融化越来越感兴趣，这两者都为建筑环境的生产带来了新的商业逻辑并塑造了城市成果。与此同时，大型城市项目作为城市扩张和更新的重要形式继续并传播，通常与跨国投资者和开发商密切相关。尽管如此，跨国行为者必须在其中实现此类项目的独特监管和政治背景对结果非常重要，领土化治理安排既塑造了跨国动态，也受其影响。然而，很少有系统地比较考虑这些不同的监管环境本身，而不是作为新自由化等更广泛循环过程的贡献者。因此，尚未有效评估不同监管制度对城市结果的影响。因此，在本文中，我们将讨论从“金融化”的全球化进程扩大到从其独特的“商业模式”的角度考虑三个大型城市发展项目，包括它们在实现国家和大都市规模更广泛的战略目标中的地位，它们的灵活且经常定制的机构配置，以及它们不同形式的融资、税收和土地价值获取。我们的案例是上海临港（九个计划中的卫星城市之一），约翰内斯堡的自由走廊项目（以线性交通为导向的开发项目，旨在整合种族分裂的城市），以及伦敦西北部的 Old Oak 和 Park Royal（隶属于市长开发公司，与重要的新大都市和国家交通投资相关） . 我们观察到，所采用的商业模式，尤其是与开发相关的财务计算和收入流相关的商业模式，是每种情况下治理和创收模式强烈依赖的结果。然而，我们希望超越将这些视为剩余的、偶然的和背景下的更广泛的城市发展账户，重点是全球化的资金流动和计算。