UC Berkeley

In recent years, a growing chorus of policymakers, scholars, and activists has begun to suggest that financial markets will play important roles in urban climate adaptation. By pricing future climate risks into existing risk rating and investment-making practices, working with city officials to assess local climate risks and beneficial courses of action, and more, these individuals have stressed that financial markets will greatly shape which cities can (and cannot) adapt to climate change, how cities adapt to climate change, and who benefits from adaptive infrastructure in cities. These are significant claims, with significant implications for climate justice: they speak to key distributional questions of how climate risk and security are distributed across space and time in cities, and who has the authority to make those distributional calls.

With these concerns and claims in mind, this study examines how finance is beginning to shape urban adaptation and resilience pathways through the exemplary case of Miami, Florida. I focus the analysis on three large-scale adaptation and resilience measures that are already underway in the highly climate vulnerable, financialized, and unequal city: the $400 million Miami Forever Bond, the Miami Forever Climate Ready Strategy, and the Resilient305 regional resilience plan. Across the measures, I explore how climate-linked investment concerns and shifts in practices of valuation among bond rating agencies, real estate and bond market investors, and (re)insurance companies are beginning to shape the what, when, and where of urban adaptation in Miami: that is, what urban adaptation practically consists of; how far into the future urban adaptation measures are meant to extend, and where urban adaptation measures are sited within the city. I use ethnographic research methods, such as extended interviews with city officials, financial experts, and climate activists; participant observation of financial industry, local government, and activist meetings, conferences, and workshops; and media analysis of climate-linked shifts in financial practice, ongoing and planned adaptation measures in Miami, and local responses to these adaptation measures.

Study findings are as follows. First, I find that local adaptation and resilience measures are key terrains where the significance of climate change for financial markets—and the significance of finance-driven adaptation for local climate outcomes—are being forged and negotiated. Second, in the absence of pre-baked consensus on how to act locally on climate risk, I observe that finance-driven adaptation and resilience measures in Miami multiply, rather than foreclose, sites of political contestation over the city’s future and present-day adaptation and resilience decision-making processes. Third, and finally, I find that local investments in adaptation and resilience are unpredictable: insofar as Miami officials direct resilience and adaptation dollars to projects that support existing patterns of urban accumulation, they also make significant investments in anti-displacement measures, confounding critical accounts which have often reduced adaptation and resilience to the latest iteration of urban growth machine politics.

The study makes three important contributions to the disciplines of urban planning and human geography. First, at a topical level the research encourages planning scholars to direct their attention to the highly consequential, yet still relatively understudied, field of finance when it comes to conducting inquiry on the politics and uneven outcomes of urban adaptation planning. Second, the research offers a novel way to analyze finance in relation to urban adaptation and resilience. Bringing literatures from the interdisciplinary field of the Social Studies of Finance to bear to the case of finance-driven adaptation in Miami, the analytical approach developed and deployed across the dissertation enables researchers to account for the geographically-contingent ensemble of power struggles, social relations, and expert practices that help shape (and reshape) what finance-driven adaptation measures, and urban adaptation and resilience more broadly, ultimately do and spell for urban climate futures. Third, and finally, by incorporating the practices and strategies of local climate justice activists into my account of finance-driven adaptation, the dissertation contributes to an emergent research agenda within financial geography which calls for tracing the work of activist movements as they attempt to rework the means of public finance toward more transformative ends.