NSF Award
2426219
This doctoral dissertation research project examines how publicly funded goods and services, such as parks, roads, and affordable housing, can attenuate or exacerbate racial inequities in cities. The study contributes to scholarly research on the social benefits of public goods, especially understandings of how the provisioning of public goods dynamically intersects with political, economic, and race relations in cities. This project also analyzes nationwide efforts for “people’s budgets”, or city budgets by and for the people, to better understand the possibilities and limitations of using public goods to address the determinants of inequality at the level of municipalities. In addition to contributing to the education and training of an early-career geographer, the broader impacts of this project include identifying structures of inequality in municipal finance and supporting ongoing policy efforts for budget transparency, accountability, and participation.<br/><br/>This project elucidates how municipal-level public goods, such as roads, parks, and affordable housing, are provisioned at the nexus of shifting political, economic and race relations. The specific aims include not only understanding why cities struggle to afford public goods, but also how race relations shape ongoing debates over what constitutes the public good (e.g., which public goods are affordable, where, and why). Through an archival, geospatial, and ethnographic study of municipal budgeting in an urban context, this project has multiple, complementary objectives. First, the study examines broad shifts to public provisioning in recent decades. Second, the research analyzes the extent to which racial disparities spatially impact the creation and distribution of public goods. Third, the research evaluates the possibilities and limitations of nationwide efforts to address inequities in municipal finance via “people’s budgets”, or city budgets by and for the people. By advancing a novel geospatial methodology, budget mapping, this study potentially serves as a model for examining the geography of public goods in cities and discerning more clearly how public goods may sustain or resolve racial and spatial inequities.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
