Home / Lectures / David Bieri, University of Michigan
Retheorizing the Urbanization of Capital: 200 Years of Evidence from Detroit

David Bieri, University of Michigan
Description
Semester:
- Fall 2014
Speakers:
Lecture Time:
Fri, October 10, 2014 @ 1:30 pm to 3:00 pm
Lecture Location:
Room R1240, Ross School of Business
Speaker Webpage(s):
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bieri/
Introduced By:
Introduction by Urban Planning PhD student Carla Maria Kayanan
Abstract
This research investigates how the evolution of finance and the process of urbanization concurrently give rise to different notions of cyclical risk that are coupled to metropolitan form. Specifically, I illustrate the spatial consequences of the political economy of the U.S. monetary-financial system, paying particular attention to the historical process by which institutional risk allocation failures have shaped urban development in Detroit. The city and its suburbs arose, in part, because building at the city’s edge was deemed risk-free and cheap — a natural extension of the frontier mentality codified in the convex bid-rent curves of the monocentric city model. Specifically, this research proposes a new financial-spatial narrative that links a historicized reading of Detroit’s rise and decline to Michigan’s turbulent financial history over the last 200 years: First, Detroit emerges as a stereotype of land-capital dynamics. Its rise and fall are largely driven by successive waves of overaccumulation and speculative real estate development. Second, Michigan’s financial history is a prototype of financial instability. The institutional origins of financial instability and banking-led crises in Michigan can be found in its 1830s legislative embrace of free banking. Detroit was at the epicenter of the 1933 banking crisis and is today setting precedent for municipal bankruptcy. Third, the Detroit metro area can be read as an archetype of frontier finance; as the financial frontier moves across time and space, different “zones of exclusion” emerge in the form of mortgage speculation, large scale vacancies, financial illiteracy and underbanked sections of the population.
Recording & Additional Notes
No additional notes available.