Dissertation Spotlight- Mo Torres

Mo Torres
Harvard University

Michigan cities were considered "arsenals of democracy” in the mid-twentieth century, prosperous and productive places that spawned the American middle class. Today, Detroit, Flint, and other race-class subjugated (Soss & Weaver 2017) Michigan cities have become laboratories of urban austerity. Detroit is the largest U. S. city to have ever filed for bankruptcy, while Flint gained recent international attention for its deadly water crisis, and cities like Highland Park and Benton Harbor are among the most economically depressed in the country. While the "Rust Belt city" narrative has been endlessly rehearsed - all of these cities bled tax revenue as the result of industrial decline, white flight, and suburbanization - that these places would come to be governed by the logics of austerity was not a foregone conclusion. My dissertation asks how Michigan cities came to be governed by the logics and politics of austerity. What actions taken by what actors shaped the state’s urban agenda? What logics were at play in this process, and how did these logics function discursively?

The dissertation draws on four decades of data spanning five gubernatorial administrations (three Republican and two Democrat), including state archives, legislative recordings and transcripts, judicial hearings, print and television media, think tank reports and policy memos, surveys, and original interviews with elected officials and state bureaucrats. The project begins in the aftermath of New York City's fiscal crisis in the 1970s that set the terms for an urban agenda friendly to finance and hostile to social spending, a moment scholars have identified as a critical point in the history of neoliberalism (Harvey 2005; Phillips-Fein 2017). It traces the implementation of Michigan's system of municipal receivership which replaced elected mayors, city councilors, and school district leaders with unelected 'emergency financial managers' - a system that overwhelmingly impacted cities with Black majorities. It ends in the wake of the Flint Water Crisis - itself a result of state takeover - as receivership became a political liability.

Empirically, I show how federalist divisions of authority posed a considerable challenge to the austerity agenda, as many local officials resisted privatization and cuts to social spending. When austerity could not be implemented solely through typical democratic channels, both Republican and Democratic officials responded with cuts to local democracy. To explain the case and its significance, I draw on theoretical work on political ideas and the formation of hegemony (in the tradition of Gramsci and Hall); materialist approaches to the study of race and racism (in the tradition of Du Bois); scholarship on neoliberal rationality (Foucault, Brown) and the politics of fiscal crisis (Phillips-Fein 2017); and sociological work on territorial stigma (Wacquant 2007), particularly at the level of the municipality (Kornberg 2016), to offer a brief list.
Citations: 
Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford.Kornberg, Dana. 2016. "The Structural Origins of Territorial Stigma: Water and Racial Politics in Metropolitan Detroit, 1950s-2010s. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40(2):263-283.
Phillips-Fein, Kim. 2017. Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics. Metropolitan Books.
Soss, Joe, and Vesla Weaver. 2017. “Police Are Our Government: Politics, Political Science, and the Policing of Race-Class Subjugated Communities.” Annual Review of Political Science 20:565-591.
Wacquant, Loïc. 2007. "Territorial Stigmatization in the Age of Advanced Marginality." Thesis Eleven (91):66-77.

Mo Torres is a PhD candidate in sociology at Harvard, Stone Fellow in the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a doctoral fellow at the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative. He is interested in questions of political economy, power, cities, race, and racism.