Before, During, and After Emergency Management: Undemocratic Urban Governance and Fiscal Responsibility in Post-industrial Interracial Suburbs, 1971-2023

Abstract

In recent decades, elected governments experiencing financial crisis in Michigan have been taken over under a hotly contested policy called Emergency Management. Blamed for the 2010s Flint Water Crisis and 2013 Detroit Bankruptcy, Emergency Management drew local and national condemnation as an assault on Black local democracy. The acute focus on these prominent crises, however, missed how Emergency Management takeovers had been occurring for decades in a range of localities as a regular feature of Michigan local governance. Given the policy’s longer history and varied applications, this dissertation asks how periods of state takeover affect local democracy, and broadly, how undemocratic cities are produced. While much attention has been given to the democratic loss during periods of takeover, I argue that undemocratic governance emerges from the everyday structure of contemporary municipal political economics rather than exceptional moments of takeover. Using ethnography and historical analysis to investigate local governance before, during, and after takeover in two Detroit suburbs, I show that it was in fact a mix of financial system, regional, state, and federal policies that produced less democratic cities.

Originating in the early 1970s under the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, Emergency Management found ideological justification not through free-market fundamentalism, but in a technocratic liberalism that sought to improve government through managerial expertise. Across the 1970s and 80s, federal and state funding for local governments dramatically retrenched while deindustrialization accelerated tax losses. Cities turned to private capital to shore up these revenue gaps and became increasingly beholden to municipal bond markets’ ideas of good governance. Through the encroachment of financial institutions, the use of enforcement mechanisms such as Emergency Management, and the need to contend with funding crises with origins beyond the bounds of cities themselves, local governments were pushed and pulled into centering ‘fiscal responsibility’ in their governance agendas. From this period to the present, cities have had to prioritize balanced budgets (maintained especially through cuts) above all other governing responsibilities, including the maintenance of basic services, the cultivation of resident belonging, and the safeguarding of fairness across communities. I argue that the consequences of these structural governing priorities constitute critical democratic threats through and beyond takeover.

However. despite the ubiquity of fiscal responsibility, undemocratic governance is unevenly felt; it is especially concentrated in post-industrial, interracial suburbs, reflecting how global capital flight and racialized difference structure municipal political economics. On the ground government and resident actors ultimately determine the outcomes of this system’s contradictions but these structures constrain the material and political options available. Undemocratic local governance is upheld in part by the misrecognition of these geographically broader factors as purely local problems.

I came to these arguments after conducting field work in the interracial, post-industrial suburbs of Ecorse and Hamtramck, Michigan—both of which had decades long entanglements with Emergency Management. From February 2021 through March 2023, I participated in the day-to-day work of governing among government employees, elected officials, residents, businesses, and consultants. I simultaneously conducted open-ended interviewing, oral histories, and archival analysis.

Ultimately, across these varied data emerged a picture of urban governance stuck in perpetual crisis. I conclude that creating the “good city”—a different vision for urban governance that balances services, belonging, and fairness—must be done by decentering fiscal responsibility and proactively recognizing the raced and classed sources of democratic unevenness.