Risk, Lending, & the Future of Debtor Urbanization is a 2018-2019 Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop approaching debt and lending as critical determinants of contemporary urbanization and city-building. Lending at a variety of scales creates opportunities for growth and decline, for expansion and exploitation, for prosperity and plunder.

At the level of the municipality, governments take on bond debt to fund infrastructural improvements, finance pensions, or deliver services. Cities like Detroit, MI and St. Louis, MO depend on the accumulation of bond debt to distribute public goods to inhabitants and establish attractive physical environments for private investment. The prospect of improvement and revitalization carries the risk of crisis and ballooning debts that thwart the functioning of public institutions or prompt the wrath of rating agencies using creditworthiness to govern a city’s fate. Within real estate markets, property owners structure financing arrangements that draw from a constellation of private lenders and public subsidies. Individuals seeking the American dream of homeownership navigate a chaotic personal finance landscape and interact with a variety of lending institutions. However, targeted predatory arrangements and market downturns threaten individual fortunes and a broader American economy dependent on the sustained health of the housing market. Finally, individuals without access to conventional banking institutions rely on Alternative Financial Services (the fringe economy) to handle both everyday and emergency needs. Desperate borrowers seek out quick cash or rent-to-own products with escalating interest rates that can culminate in surrendered assets and wrecked credit scores. At all scales, the racial capitalist underpinnings of the American financial system unevenly distribute risk and precarity in ways that reinforce class, gender, and race hierarchies.

This constellation of borrowing and lending implicates a variety of geographies, technologies, institutions, and political ideologies. Municipalities, prospective homeowners, and fringe finance borrowers inhabit a financial environment that depends on unfettered access to capital and unambiguous punishment for delinquency. But these futures become uncertain when lending institutions call in debts, unevenly sanction borrowers, or change lending terms. Each day, government units declare bankruptcy, families lose their homes, and individuals fight off aggressive collections agencies. When debt is involved, inclusion is not a synonym of progress.

The RIW “Risk, Lending, and the Future of Debtor Urbanization” assembles UM students and scholars to share work on this landscape of contemporary finance that contains both the potential for development and the possibility of devastation. Global economies and individual wealth are each dependent on a flow of debt and credit that has become an ordinary aspect of modern life. Today, it is difficult to imagine financial and governmental relationships that do not include debt, interest, liquidity, and the rule of speculative governance. This RIW focuses on bond, mortgage, and fringe finance as processes central to the ordering and activity of the contemporary metropolis. City-building and inhabitance have become subject to accessing credit, extending debt, preserving assets, and maintaining portfolios. Through a reading group, writing workshop, guests lectures, and an annual symposium (Fixed Interest, March, 15 2019), the organizers and participants of this RIW center and examine risk and credit in their gendered, classed, and racialized forms as part of a global process we term Debtor Urbanization.