Philip Ashton
Professor and Department Head
Urban Planning and Policy
Pronouns: He/Him/His
Contact
Building & Room:
229 CUPPA Hall, MC 348
Address:
412 S. Peoria St., Suite 229
Office Phone:
Email:
About
Phil Ashton joined the Urban Planning and Policy Program at UIC in August 2005. Initially trained as a political scientist and an urban planner, he worked as a technical assistance provider and trainer for existing and startup housing and consumer cooperatives in Canada and the United States. For six years, he was a research associate at the Center for Urban Policy Research at Rutgers University, investigating neighborhood change in Newark, NJ and large scale urban redevelopment in Camden, NJ. He has consulted on issues related to housing policy, mortgage discrimination, and privatization.
Phil’s research has been at the forefront of work on the political economy of urban “financialization,” a field concerned with the deepening links between financial markets and cities. He has developed a distinct profile in this field by focusing on the growing scope for private finance within urban governance, examining how heightened reliance on financial instruments changes the way planners and policymakers conceive of and act on pressing urban problems, particularly those linked to legacies of racial exclusion or austerity. This work has been deeply interdisciplinary, requiring engagement with concepts and methods from socio-legal studies, economic geography, heterodox economics, political theory, and anthropology. He has published work on these topics in leading journals, including Economy & Society, Environment & Planning A, Urban Studies, Geoforum, the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and the Urban Affairs Review .
Currently, Phil is engaged in two long-term research projects. A first project examines emergent forms of local financial "statecraft," assessing how cities are exposed to new uncertainties as they assemble political capacity by turning to private financial actors and instruments. With his colleagues Rachel Weber (UIC) and Marc Doussard (UIUC), Phil has done work on the role of investment banks and infrastructure funds in producing the growing market for urban infrastructure assets, including long-term leases for Chicago’s Skyway and parking meters. He has recently turned this approach towards local climate action planning, examining how decarbonization initiatives unfold within the financial apparatuses and logics of local austerity. Focusing on innovative public building retrofit programs in Chicago and elsewhere, this research examines the tensions and contradictions set in motion as public buildings and their technical systems are repositioned as assets for private investors or creditors. He has developed an international dimension to this work under the aegis of a Visiting Professor appointment at l'Université Gustave Eiffel in Paris, where he works with colleagues at the Laboratoire Techniques Territoires et Sociétés (LATTS).
In a second current line of research, Phil works on the political economy of law as it relates to racialized histories of credit and property. Building on almost 20 years studying racially-exploitative credit within the U.S. subprime mortgage market, he has turned close examination of recent lawsuits and court rulings involving claims of racial discrimination. This has resulted in a series of analyses of how authorization for racist financial practices is being rewritten within intersecting doctrines of property and contract law, financial regulations, and rules of civil procedure. This topic was his focus while a Visiting Scholar at the American Bar Foundation in 2013-2014, and he is currently working it into a book manuscript Doe v. Subprime: Law, Reparations, and the Adjudication of the U.S. Mortgage Crisis. While this work challenges the politics of financial reparations by highlighting how legal frameworks such as civil rights, nuisance, or fraud are systematically blunted when they try to link racialized injury to exploitative lending practices, it also shows how the plurality of law creates openings for reparative politics on the part of new legal agents.
You can find Phil on Bluesky.
Selected Publications
Ashton, Philip. 2023. Collateral damage: Racial logics of property in the adjudication of the US foreclosure crisis. Geoforum 140 (March). PDF version available here.
Ashton, Philip, and Brett Christophers. 2018. Remaking mortgage markets by remaking mortgages: US housing finance after the crisis
Economic Geography 94(3): 238-258. PDF version available here.
Ashton, Philip. 2018. Time-spaces of adjudication in the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis. In Law and Time, S. Beynan-Jones and E. Grabham (eds), pp. 75-92. London: Routledge.
Ashton, Philip, Doussard, Marc, and Rachel Weber. 2016. Reconstituting the state: City powers and exposures in Chicago’s infrastructure leases. Special Issue on “Financialization and the Production of Urban Space”. Urban Studies 53(7): 1384-1400. PDF version available here.
Ashton, Philip, and Brett Christophers. 2015. On arbitration, arbitrage and arbitrariness in financial markets and their governance: Unpacking LIBOR and the LIBOR scandal. Economy & Society 44(2): 188-217. PDF version available here.
Ashton, Philip. 2014. The evolving juridical space of harm/value: Remedial powers in the subprime mortgage crisis. Journal of Economic Issues 48(4): 959-979. PDF version available here.
Ashton, Philip. 2012. ‘Troubled assets’: The financial emergency and racialized risk. International Journal of Urban & Regional Research 36 (4): 773-790. PDF version available here.
Ashton, Philip, Doussard, Marc, and Rachel Weber. 2012. The financial engineering of infrastructure privatization: What are public assets worth to private investors? Journal of the American Planning Association 78(3): 300-312. PDF version available here.
Ashton, Philip. 2011. The financial exception and the reconfiguration of credit risk in US mortgage markets. Environment and Planning A 43(8): 1796-1812. PDF version available here.
Ashton, Philip. 2009. An appetite for yield: The anatomy of the subprime mortgage crisis. Environment and Planning A 41(6): 1420-1441. PDF version available here.
Publication Aggregators
Education
Bachelor of Arts (Honours) - University of Winnipeg (1990); Masters in Urban Planning - McGill University (1993); Ph.D. - Rutgers University (2005).