Debt space

Topologies, ecologies and Ramallah, Palestine

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4476121
AutoresChristopher Harker (0000-0002-3084-9799, Durham University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2017
Volumen35
Número4
Páginas600-619
Fecha de publicación2017-08-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaEnvironment and Planning D Society and Space (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0263-7758 • E-ISSN: 1472-3433
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0263775816686973
OpenAlexW2575316004
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas54
Referencias citadas60

Debt is widely conceived as temporal - present consumption bought with future labour. This paper advances conceptualisations of debt by incorporating the active role space plays in creating, maintaining and undermining debt relations. Debts are topological binds - a particular kind of spatial connection, which are entangled with topographic spaces to produce debt ecologies. This argument is developed by tracing the creation, maintenance and/or destruction of spatial connections between different people, communities, institutions and sites in the Palestinian conurbation of Ramallah - Al Bireh. Attending to the spatiality of debt offers a better understanding of debt itself, and extends relational approaches to finance that deploy network imaginaries, which cannot account for topological spacings that fold or dissolve distance and divisions. The extensive range of time-spaces that co-constitute specific debt ecologies also reveal a more-than-economic geography, which in the context of Ramallah enfolds family and geopolitics. These entanglements emerge from a methodological approach that uses ethnography to move beyond statistical representations of debt. Thinking debt topologically also responds to postcolonial concerns about the locatedness of theory

Argument (complex analysis · Banking stability, regulation, efficiency · Housing Market and Economics · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism