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FrancoAngeli Journals

Longform

No. 30 (2025): U3 iQuaderni. Journal of urban studies

Debtscapes

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3280/u3q30-2025oa19078
Submitted
dicembre 24, 2024
Published
2026-07-20

Abstract

The hypothesis argued here is that debt is not only an economic or temporal affair, but an actual ‘practice of dwelling’ that manifests itself according to precise forms of spatial production. Space that is produced within conditions of obligation, of intertwined forms of predation and extractivist production, of failure, of strategies of resistance, of ruin and rupture. Debt is, in the common sense, an action of borrowing in the present and repaying in the future (Mauss 1954; Bourdieu 1977; Derrida 1992). But debt is not simply an economic device, it is also, and above all, a technique of governing and controlling individual and collective subjectivities, i.e. it is a political construction. An interweaving of ideas, imaginaries, needs and fears. However, it is essential to understand debt as a spatial as well as temporal and social relation if we are to understand the experience of indebtedness and the social and spatial repercussions of this process. Above all, debt is a biopolitical fact. It is pedagogical and punitive, it brings politics and policy together. Debt is one of those few places where microeconomics and macroeconomics intertwine in a complex way, because just as, for example, state debt tends to increase, so do personal debts. Can debt become a processing principle for spatial analysis? Can the debt machine become a project device in the same way that, for example, contemporary ecological, health and climate crises have redefined themes and forms of project action?

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