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**CALL FOR PAPERS EXTENDED TO OCTOBER 16**


ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN GEOGRAPHERS MEETING


Washington, DC, April 3-7, 2019


*Debtor Urbanization: Fringes and FIREs in Contemporary City-Building*


Session Organizers: Michael R. Koscielniak (University of Michigan) and
Michael Borsellino (University of Michigan)


This paper session explores the relationship between debt 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 conceals crisis and enables ballooning debts that thwart the
functioning of public institutions or prompt the wrath of rating agencies
employing creditworthiness to govern a city’s fate. Within real estate
markets, developers structure financing arrangements that draw from a
roster of private lenders and public subsidies. Individuals dreaming of
owner-occupancy navigate a crowded lending landscape and interact with
mortgage institutions specializing in transaction speed over tenancy
security. Targeted predatory arrangements, deregulation, speculation, and
market “downturns” threaten individual fortunes and a broader American
economy dependent on the sustained health of the housing market. Finally,
persons and families without access to conventional banking institutions
rely on Alternative Financial Services (the fringe economy) to handle both
ordinary and emergency needs. These marginalized borrowers seek out quick
cash or rent-to-own products with escalating interest rates culminating 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 subjugation and
hierarchies. Municipalities, prospective homeowners, and fringe finance
borrowers inhabit a neoliberalized financial environment that depends on
frictionless access to capital and draconian penalties for delinquency. But
lives and futures become uncertain when lending institutions securitize
debt, call in loans, unevenly sanction borrowers, or change lending terms.
Each day, government units declare bankruptcy, families surrender their
homes, and individuals fight off aggressive collections agencies. Where
debt is concerned, inclusion is not synonymous with progress.



This session centers debt as a determinant of contemporary urbanization. We
assemble papers exploring the constellation of borrowing and lending and
its expression in a variety of geographies, fields of practice,
technologies, institutions, labor, and political ideologies. We are seeking
papers that interrogate the fringes and the FIREs (finance, insurance, and
real estate) of *debtor urbanization*. The session also invites work on
student loans, micro-credit, and adjustment policies. We are interested in
work that examines the relationship between debt and urban and neighborhood
decline (in growing and shrinking cities). We invite work analyzing debt in
a variety of forms, histories, and contexts. Additionally, we encourage
submissions that present political and policy interventions into
*debtor urbanization* establishing post-debt or non-debt futures and
systems.



If you are interested in preparing a paper in this organized session,
please send your name, affiliation, paper title, and abstract (250 words
max) to Michael R. Koscielniak – [log in to unmask] - no later than *October
16*.



*Note: The organizers of this paper session also coordinate a Rackham
Interdisciplinary Workshop
<http://sites.google.com/umich.edu/debtor-urbanization/home> on debt and
urbanization at the University of Michigan. UM will host a paper symposium
in March 2019 and we invite persons interested in the AAG session to
present their research at this event as well.  *


-- 
Michael RJ Koscielniak <http://mrjkoscielniak.wordpress.com>

*PhD Candidate* | Urban & Regional Planning
Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning
*Organizer* | Risk, Lending, & the Future of Debtor Urbanization
University of Michigan

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