Financializing Detroit

Taking as its focus the not-so-special case of Detroit, which recently experienced the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history, this article explores the financialization of American urban governance in both conceptual and concrete terms. The financially mediated restructuring of Detroit, through the imposition of emergency management by the state of Michigan and subsequently through the federal bankruptcy code, has been portrayed as an extreme event, with deep roots in histories of deindustrialization, racial exclusion, and suburban flight. It is not to downplay the significance of this experience to suggest, however, that the Detroit case also represents an ordinary crisis of a faltering regime of financialized urbanism. Compounding a shift toward entrepreneurial urban governance, cities now find themselves in an operating environment that has been constitutively financialized. Bondholder-value disciplines have become systemic in reach, along with an amplified role for financial gatekeepers like credit rating agencies; technocratic forms of financial management have been spreading and deepening, both in supposedly normal times and under externally imposed emergency measures; and in some cities the routinized play of growth-machine politics is being eclipsed by a new generation of debt-machine dynamics. While the ultimate focus of this article is on Detroit, its chief concern is with the framing of the city’s storied financial crisis—theoretically and then institutionally.