Infrastructure Financing and the Bonds of Inequality

Rachel Weber — 2021-10-19T05:00:00Z

Rachel Weber reviews historian Destin Jenkins' new book, The Bonds of Inequality: Debt and the Making of the American City, which shows how decisions about infrastructure financing reinforce preexisting racial inequalities and hierarchies.
As the United States awaits a massive federal stimulus in the depths of the 2021 pandemic, it is easy to become spellbound by the possibilities of infrastructure. We think that public things—sewers, schools, roads, public housing—will save us, that they

- Reviews / infrastructure, inequalities, debt, United States, finance, local finance

Sale of the Century: Chicago's Infrastructure Deals and the Privatization State

Philip Ashton & Marc Doussard & Rachel Weber — 2020-11-24T06:00:00Z

Since 2004, the City of Chicago has been engaged in a new wave of infrastructure privatizations, selling concessions to financial institutions. Philip Ashton, Marc Doussard and Rachel Weber analyze the consequences of these transfers in detail, in terms of both public action and the impact on users, and identify lessons to be learned from this new way of doing things, whereby firms mine the city for potential revenue streams.
---- Series: Cities in the Age of Financialization When the City

- From the Field / financialization, privatization, infrastructure, infrastructures, urban services, Chicago, United States

Metropolitics

Infrastructure Financing and the Bonds of Inequality

Sale of the Century: Chicago's Infrastructure Deals and the Privatization State