Power, Participation, and Protest in Flint, Michigan

Unpacking the Policy Paradox of Municipal Takeovers

Ashley E. Nickels

• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781439915677
  9781439915660
• eBook ISBN:
  9781439915684
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

When the 2011 municipal takeover in Flint, Michigan placed the city under state control, some supported the intervention while others saw it as an affront to democracy. Still others were ambivalent about what was supposed to be a temporary disruption. However, the city's fiscal emergency soon became a public health emergency—the Flint Water Crisis—that captured international attention.

But how did Flint's municipal takeovers, which suspended local representational government, alter the local political system? In Power, Participation, and Protest in Flint, Michigan, Ashley Nickels addresses the ways residents, groups, and organizations were able to participate politically—or not—during the city's municipal takeovers in 2002 and 2011. She explains how new politics were created as organizations developed, new coalitions emerged and evolved, and people's understanding of municipal takeovers changed.

Inwalking readers through the policy history of, implementation of, and reaction to Flint's two municipal takeovers, Nickels highlights how the ostensibly apolitical policy is, in fact, highly political.

Table of contents

• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Introduction. The Politics of Municipal Takeovers: Power, Participation, and Protest
• 1. Why Cities Go Broke and Flint’s Financial Collapse
• 2. Saving Cities from Themselves: How States Respond to Urban Fiscal Crises
• 3. The Policy Paradox of Municipal Takeover: How the Policy Creates Politics
• 4. Contextualizing the Flint Case: Race, Class, and Contentious Politics
• 5. The "Development Agenda": Implementing Municipal Takeover in Flint
• 6. From Development Agenda to Development Regime: Allocating Benefits and Burdens and Interpreting Winners and Losers
• 7. Defending Democracy: Responding to the Municipal Takeover
• 8. From Fiscal Emergency to Public Health Emergency: Differing Responses to the Flint Water Crisis / Co-authored with Amanda D. Clark
• Conclusion. Summary Findings, Implications, and Recommendations
• Appendix 1. Research Design and Methodology
• Appendix 2
• Appendix 3
• Notes
• References
• Index