Resisting devaluation: Foreclosure, eminent domain law, and the geographical political economy of risk
本文研究美国地方政府利用征用权强制收购负资产抵押贷款并重新融资的方案，分析其对城市金融资本主义、风险分配和法律治理的挑战，强调价值与风险的地理不均衡性及话语的物质效应。
This article examines recent plans for US municipalities to use the state legal power of eminent domain to forcibly acquire “underwater” mortgages (i.e. those with negative equity), and to refinance them on terms more favorable to the homeowners in question, as a way of addressing in a socially progressive way the nation’s ongoing foreclosure crisis. The article makes three main arguments. The first is that insofar as the plan threatens to disrupt prevailing norms of value distribution and risk bearing, it represents a fundamental challenge to the existing political economy of urban financial capitalism in the US and the law’s mediation thereof. The second is that value, risk, and their mediation through law must be understood in the context of geographical unevenness and shifting scales of legal governance. The third is that the geographical political economy associated with the eminent domain plan is about discourses—of risk, of markets, and indeed of law per se—no less than materialities; and that the two are indelibly linked, with discourses having material effects when, through law, they structure value and risk for the manifold actors who operate within the sphere of housing finance.