Financial Innovation To Support Metropolitan Projects – Overview

Bruce Katz, Centennial Scholar at the Brookings Institution and Luise Noring, professor at the Copenhagen Business School, desbribe an innovative metropolitan finance model implemented in Copnehagen. This model is to create a publicly-owned, privately-funded corporation to finance new infrastructures.

The major challenge for metropolises today is to find new levers for territorial development. The challenge is double: to ensure their attractiveness in a strong competitive context and to accommodate the demographic flows that converge towards them. The involvement of private actors helps cities to find new forms of financing these large-scale future project. The role of the private sector in the urban fabric is not new but it changes today because of the local financial situation, the scale of capital needs (sustainable development, digital transformation, urban renewal&
8230;) and finally new objectives of optimization and efficiency of public action.

The urban fabric is then reorganized according to a triple movement:

1. greater involvement of the private sector in the city according to a partnership approach, with a view to promoting the optimization of urban goods and services. Public-private partnerships are well-known example among others.

2. a financialization of the city with the weight of more and more important actors such as investments funds, insurance or banks, in search of new media and who see urban objects as financial assets

3. a new affirmation of the key role of public actors who have regulatory power and a certain number of assets &
8211; often dormant such as abandoned land (industrial sites, abandoned space&
8230;). It is a question of « Activating the value of the metropolitan heritage », key driver of this project of construction of the city on the city.