Spatializing the Municipal Bond Market: Urban Resilience under Racial Capitalism

Abstract

Majority-Black cities in North America are not often described in the academic literature as such. Racial capitalism is a restorative approach that puts majority-Black cities in the Global North into analytical relation with other cities in the global urban landscape. This is an important step to take for many reasons, including rising interest in conversations about the financial production of urban natures in the context of climate change. Moreover, there is a dearth of mixed method empirics documenting the role of racial capitalism in the production of urban space and urban natures. To address this gap, I pair a case study of Jackson, Mississippi’s, struggle to fund mandated upgrades to its water system with analysis of a data set containing interest rates of approximately 5 million municipal bonds issued between 1970 and 2014. I find that since financial deregulation in 1999 and 2000, majority-Black cities have been charged more than their white counterparts to produce their built environments. These findings reveal a conflation between territorialized Blackness and financial risk. Thus exposed, I argue that the racialization of urban finance has previously unexamined implications for the production of urban natures and the establishment of just transitions and socioecological futures.