ABSTRACT
While urban geography has produced important and timely work on the impact of financialisation on the city, the condition of municipal “indebtedness” in the global South remains critically under-researched. Public debt crises tend to be seen as problems for nation-states rather than cities and, in a context where the majority of urban knowledge is produced in the North and the major metropolises of the South, the experience of indebtedness in secondary and smaller cities is continually overlooked. This chapter explores the politics of municipal indebtedness in Zarqa, a post-industrial and relatively impoverished secondary city in Jordan. Drawing on first-hand correspondence with key actors in the city and supplemented by various secondary sources (press articles, financial data), the dynamics of indebtedness are told through the temporary suspension of municipal service provision in September 2018, when Mayor Ali Abu Sukkur demanded the release of centrally held funds to ease the city’s developmental impasse. The chapter explores the political and spatial dimensions of municipal indebtedness in the context of secondary cities, and it argues that a critical finance approach is crucial to understanding the political, economic and developmental logics operating within overlooked cities.
