Mo Torres: They Ran that City Down: Municipal Stigma and Urban Austerity in Michigan | City & Regional Planning Lecture
How do policy elites justify the refusal of economic aid to fiscally distressed municipalities?
In this lecture, Mo Torres considers the case of Michigan where cities like Detroit and Flint have long been governed by an urban austerity regime. Through an analysis of data spanning legislative debates, judicial hearings, print and documentary media, interviews, and other sources, Torres shares research that advances a concept of municipal stigmatization, showing how policy elites precluded the possibility of municipal bailouts by blaming urban governments for their own fiscal distress.
Policy elites framed post-industrial municipalities as “undeserving cities,” describing them as corrupt places run by incompetent leaders beholden to special interests, particularly labor unions. When these policy elites did acknowledge structural factors such as post-industrial decline and extreme segregation, these factors were swiftly dismissed, returning to stigmatizing explanations. Because the municipality is an administrative division responsible for significant resource distribution in the United States (relative to other advanced capitalist countries), stigma at the municipal level poses unique challenges to equitable resource provision under U.S. federalism.
Sponsored by the Department of City & Regional Planning.
About the Speaker
Mo Torres is a sociologist interested in urban political economy, inequality, the sociology of race/racism, and the politics of knowledge production. He is currently Postdoctoral Fellow of the Michigan Society of Fellows and Assistant Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the University of Michigan. His current book project uses mixed and historical methods to explore the politics of post-industrial decline and the production of urban austerity in Michigan from the 1970s to the present. He is a former Fulbright fellow (Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil) and received his PhD in sociology from Harvard University in 2023. Originally from Sacramento, he attended UC Davis as a first-generation college student.
Free and open to the public.
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