Bonding out the future: Tracing the politics of urban climate finance in Miami, Florida

ABSTRACT

Over the past decade, city governments have increasingly turned to financial markets to help pay for elements of their resilience plans. The techno-utopian zeal of the plans and related financing mechanisms has led some scholars to read both as diagnostic of the “post-political” urban condition. This paper engages these concerns through the case of the Miami Forever Bond, a novel $400 million bond that pays for an initial round of resilient infrastructure in Miami, Florida. Bringing social studies of finance and racial capitalism scholarship to bear on the case, I argue that the bond helps constitute and formalize a terrain of struggle over the city’s future and its longstanding “infrastructural investments in whiteness.” The case thus belies a straightforward reading of urban climate finance as diagnostic of the post-political urban condition. It also points to a need to revisit prominent modes of inquiry on, and recognition of, the politics of urban climate finance. Thus, in the conclusion I reflect on how the approach developed here can be used to (1) analyze actually existing urban politics as they increasingly transpire under the banner of climate finance and (2) aid in growing scholarly calls to pinpoint possibilities for climate-linked repair.

KEYWORDS:

• Cities
• environment
• finance

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank local journalists and public librarians for their challenging, often thankless, and vital work of creating and maintaining public memory. The author would also like to thank Stephen Collier, Kevin Grove, two anonymous reviewers, and members of the Urban Climate Finance Network for their constructive comments on this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In public appearances, Mayor Suarez routinely refers to the bond as emblematic of “harnessing the power of the free market” to prepare for climate change (see his speech at the 2020 Conservative Climate Action Rally).

2. Concessions include proposed tax incentives and zoning changes to encourage developers to build in highly elevated neighborhoods rather than the city’s low-lying, already flooding coasts. Critics have suggested that the changes will lead to displacement among longtime, low-income residents.

3. Here, problematization refers not to the task of “uncovering” what is excluded when specific phenomena or concepts (such as urban resilience) become objects of government, but analyzing actions taken in response to difficult situations (Collier, 2009; Foucault et al., 2008).

4. For research on South Florida’s physical vulnerabilities to climate change, see Bakkensen et al. (2019), Treuer (2017), and Wdowinski et al. (2016). For research on the possible knock-on effects of climate change for property, mortgage, and insurance markets, see Warren-Myers et al. (2018), Ann Conyers et al. (2019), McAlpine and Porter (2018), and Keenan and Bradt (2020), and Taylor (2020), respectively. For research on how physical climate risks may worsen key infrastructural sectors, such as affordable housing, water, and transportation, see Taylor and Aalbers (2022), Walter et al. (2016), M. Hauer et al. (2021), and Garcia et al. (2019).

5. Some notable exceptions included the passage of bond funds for segregated beaches.

6. See Smiley (2017) for a detailed account of how the exchanges between the father and son prompted the mayor to make sea level rise a chief concern of his administration.

7. Miami ranks seventh in the world in terms of unaffordable housing, which experts tie to high housing costs and dramatic, racialized income inequality (Cox & Pavletich, 2019).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [2025990] and The Katherine S. and James K. Lau Graduate Fellowship in Climate Equity, Rausser College of Natural Resources, University of California, Berkeley.

Notes on contributors

Savannah Cox

Savannah Cox is an Assistant Professor of Human Geography at Loughborough University. She focuses on the intersections of financial systems, adaptive urban infrastructures, and climate justice. Her work has been published in academic and public outlets including The Geographical Journal, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, Economy & Society, The New Republic, and Salon.