Large-scale urban development projects are a significant format of urban expansion and
renewal across the globe. As generators of governance innovation and indicators of the
future city in each urban context, large-scale development projects have been
interpreted within frameworks of “variegations” of wider circulating processes, such as
neoliberalisation or financialisation. However, such projects often entail significant state
support and investment, are strongly linked to a wide variety of transnational investors
and developers and are frequently highly contested in their local environments. Thus,
each project comes to fruition in a distinctive regulatory context, often as an exception
to the norm, and each emerges through complex interactions over a long period of time
amongst an array of actors. We therefore seek to broaden the discussion from an
analytical focus on variegated globalised processes to consider three large-scale urban
development projects (in Shanghai, Johannesburg and London) as distinctive
(transcalar) territorialisations. Using an innovative comparative approach we outline the
grounds for a systematic analytical conversation across mega-urban development
projects in very different contexts. Initially, comparability rests on the shared features
of large-scale developments – that they are multi-jurisdictional, involve long time scales,
and bring significant financing challenges. Comparing three development projects we are able to interrogate, rather than take for granted, how wider processes, circulating
practices, transcalar actors, and territorial regulatory formations composed specific
urban outcomes in each case. Thinking across these diverse cases provides grounds for
rebuilding understandings of urban development politics