Infrastructural entrepreneurialism as statecraft: transforming urban governance in infrastructure-led redevelopment

Amid the global turn toward infrastructure-led development and the resurgence of state capitalism, how is urban governance being restructured beyond neoliberal urban entrepreneurialism? This article argues that infrastructural entrepreneurialism is emerging as a new mode of urban governance, in which the crafting of urban infrastructure becomes a key vehicle for embedding state transformative strategies into urban entrepreneurial trajectories and socioeconomic development. Using a conjunctural case study of the Wuhan Sponge City project, the article argues that infrastructure plays a constitutive role in this post-neoliberal urban transition across discursive, financial, and material processes: (1) reframing the urban future through infrastructure as a discursive technology of party-statecraft; (2) reorganizing capital through infrastructure as a lever for equity-based reconfiguration of state power; and (3) making assets through infrastructure as a material practice of state rent formation. However, infrastructural entrepreneurialism does not necessarily fulfill state intentions. The article develops a 2 × 2 framework to conceptualize the inherent contradictory tendencies of infrastructural entrepreneurialism, rooted in the scalar politics of the state and the tension between state logics and capitalist logics. More broadly, the framework of infrastructural entrepreneurialism also seeks to offer a mid-level, comparative problem space for examining variegated urban governance under global infrastructure-led urbanization.