Kathryn Furlong
While most work focuses on northern cities, southern cities likewise engage in urban growth and debt machine politics with state-owned enterprises (SOEs) acting as key players. This paper draws on the local state financialization and new state capitalism literatures to examine the efforts of Southern cities to pursue infrastructure-based growth. Focusing on Medellín, Colombia, I demonstrate how that city mobilized its SOE, EPM, to fund growth through infrastructure debt and financialization, as well as expansion into new utility markets. Devaluation and accounting emerge as key, but often overlooked, processes that drive growth and increased wealth extraction from service-dependent households. Corporate expansion serves as a defensive strategy in the context of liberalization, yielding few dividends. Ultimately, user fees, not dividends, sustain the city's debt/growth infrastructures.