Origins of the Flint Water Crisis: Uneven Development, Urban Political Ecology, and Racial Capitalism

What conditions gave rise to the Flint Water Crisis? Students of contemporary urban disasters tend to advance two claims, increasingly in tandem. First, preexisting racial and class inequalities structure both the impact of disasters on urban communities and the dynamics of resettlement. Second and similarly, neoliberalism (variously theorized as neoliberal urbanism and the growth machine) prefigures urban disasters and underpins an ensuing market-oriented process of redevelopment. While long-standing patterns of inequality and neoliberalization are important contextual factors, by themselves they tend to undertheorize the timing and ecological content of urban crises. In this article, we synthesize the literature on uneven development, urban political ecology, and racial capitalism to advance an alternative hypothesis. Drawing on interviews with Flint residents and Michigan officials, the archival correspondence of government agencies, and ethnographic data, we argue that the Flint Water Crisis was the consequence of an extractivist project of White state and suburban actors to “regionalize” and thereby expropriate the assets and natural resources controlled by the predominantly Black working-class city of Detroit. Specifically, the formation of two regional water authorities required that Flint leave the Detroit Water and Sewer Department for an interim water source, the Flint River, which had been contaminated by decades of automotive toxins.