2026 Theses Doctoral

A Manhattan Bargain in Indiana: Infrastructural Narratives and Institutional Capital in the New Contract State

Mehta, Deepa

Infrastructure privatization is not new to the United States, although the turn to institutional capital has changed its terms. Historically, infrastructure was financed through public fiscal instruments—municipal bonds, commercial lending, contracting—yet was still owned and governed by public agencies. The entry of private capital markets recasts this logic by transforming infrastructure into long-term investment products for institutional investors like private equity and pension funds. What began as a niche procurement model is now scaling through the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). While planning and infrastructure studies scholars actively study the effects of infrastructure privatization and financialization, few empirical case studies theorize how private capital mechanisms restructure planning institutions from within.

Through a longitudinal case study of the privatization of the Indiana Toll Road (ITR), this dissertation examines how long-term concession agreements and the influx of private capital frameworks transform urban and regional planning scope, authority, and temporalities. Drawing on contract theory, economic sociology, and infrastructure planning literature and archival research, contract and financial analysis, and select expert interviews, I trace how securitizing infrastructure alters local and regional planning by introducing new financial tools, industrial practices and norms, and infrastructure asset management networks. Together, these dynamics constitute new contract state: a qualitative restructuring of planning scope and authority in which, in this case, toll-road adjacent planning and development is governed through long-term private capital contracts and frameworks. I further show how these frameworks are stabilized through infrastructural narratives and temporal lock-in effects that risk conscripting planning and development to private capital logic for nearly a century.

Yet these findings also open new apertures for civic intervention and planning action. Planners who understand the financial logic of these agreements can intervene at critical junctures—at negotiation, at renegotiation, at crisis—to recenter public purpose. This dissertation foregrounds that, under institutional capital, the contract is not just a legal instrument—it is the essential terrain for planning practice.