The violence of municipal debt: From interest rate swaps to racialized harm in the Detroit water crisis
The violence of municipal debt: From interest rate swaps to racialized harm in the Detroit water crisis
复制标题
市政债务的暴力：从利率互换到底特律水危机中的种族化伤害
DOI：
10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.07.009
复制
发表时间：
2019
期刊：
影响因子：
3.5
通讯作者：
Mikael Omstedt
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
C. Ponder;Mikael Omstedt
随着金融化的兴起，很少有社会关系不受债务动态的影响。与此同时，债务关系很难说凌驾于社会空间差异的其他轴线之上。例如，“黑人的命也重要”（Black Lives Matter）等运动就聚集在一起，反对充斥着种族差异的州暴力的城市状况。然而，这些城市暴力的壮观时刻往往伴随着更抽象形式的金融暴力。以底特律供水和污水处理部门（DWSD）的破产为例，我们试图调查美国市政债务危机作为金融化种族资本主义的条件，说明拉伸的时空金融关系与壮观的社会暴力表现之间的相互作用。为了做到这一点，我们调查了一系列利率互换交易，这些交易将底特律水务部门推入预算危机，追踪了它们在底特律地区和水务部门服务区的影响，在这些地区，市政债务导致的水费上涨引发了人道主义灾难。我们的目标是超越抽象的金融与其具体的暴力表现之间的联系，并进一步有助于理解市政财政如何重新阐明种族等级制度，并在美国城市中产生多种形式的种族化伤害。我们得出结论：(1)“紧缩城市主义”的研究人员必须参与种族资本主义的逻辑，以便充分解释金融关系如何跨越经济和社会循环并共同产生；(2)参与金融的社会差异动态对于解释种族化暴力的当代城市表达同样必要。
With the rise of financialization few social relations have been left untouched by debt dynamics. At the same time, the debt relation can hardly be said to override other axes of socio-spatial difference. Movements like Black Lives Matter have, for example, rallied against an urban condition that is rife with racially differentiated state violence. Yet these spectacular moments of urban violence are often underwritten by more abstract forms of financial violence. Using the insolvency of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) as a case study, we seek to investigate the American municipal debt crisis as a condition of financialized racial capitalism, illustrating the interplay between stretched spatio-temporal financial relations and spectacular expressions of social violence. We do this by interrogating a series of interest rate swap deals that pushed DWSD into budgetary crisis, tracking their ramifications across the Detroit region and DWSD service area, where municipal debt-induced hikes in water bills have engineered humanitarian disasters. Our aim is to go beyond mapping the connections between the abstractions of finance and their concrete violent manifestations and further contribute to understandings of how municipal finance rearticulates racial hierarchies and produces multiple forms of racialized harm in the American city. We conclude (i) that researchers of ‘austerity urbanism’ must engage the logics of racial capitalism in order to fully explain how financial relations reach across and coproduce economic and social circuits and (ii) engaging the socially differentiating dynamics of finance is equally necessary to explain contemporary urban expressions of racialized violence.