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Reimagining the municipal economy: The emancipatory politics of the people’s budget movement

Author

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  • Emily Barrett

    (Vanderbilt University, USA)

  • Sara Safransky

    (Vanderbilt University, USA)

Abstract

Budgets are often thought of as boring, invoking the tedium of bookkeeping. The summer of 2020 suggested otherwise. As America’s plague of police brutality combined with the death-dealing blows of the COVID-19 pandemic and a wave of urban uprising gripped US cities, activists turned their organising attention to municipal budgeting. From Seattle to Atlanta, demands rang out for cities to #defund the police, rethink public safety and adopt budgets for the people. Since then, the people’s budget movement has grown in strength at the municipal level, including in Los Angeles, Chicago, Louisville, Jacksonville, Minneapolis and Nashville, among other cities. What should urban studies scholars make of these struggles and from the aspirations and visions that impel them? This paper uses a case study of the Nashville People’s Budget Coalition (NPBC) to examine how municipal budgeting processes and public financing have become new sites of theorisation, debate and political intervention. We demonstrate how the people’s budget movement offers a new calculus for municipal budgeting that radically reconceptualises the logics of value and care that underpin economic thought and public accounting practices. We conclude by considering avenues through which a scholarly agenda for economic democracy in solidarity with movement organisers could be expanded.

Suggested Citation

  • Emily Barrett & Sara Safransky, 2024. "Reimagining the municipal economy: The emancipatory politics of the people’s budget movement," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 61(11), pages 2135-2155, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:61:y:2024:i:11:p:2135-2155
    DOI: 10.1177/00420980241231439
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    3. Lesley Catchpowle & Stewart Smyth, 2016. "Accounting and social movements: An exploration of critical accounting praxis," Accounting Forum, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 40(3), pages 220-234, September.
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