What makes a space risky? Dark alleys? Downgraded bonds? Mitchell examines the way that concepts of financial risk and physical risk come together and influence urban politics. Tracing the movement of two global companies—Moody’s Investors Service and Giuliani Partners—she shows how U.S. directed ideas about risk and security profoundly affect the governance of cities worldwide.

Katharyne Mitchell is Professor and Chair of Geography and the Simpson Professor of the Public Humanities at the University of Washington. Her topical interests include urban studies, migration, public scholarship, and education. In recent work she has written about immigrant integration in France, education and citizenship in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., and new urban technologies of social and spatial control. From 2004-2007 she was the director of the Reclaiming Childhood project, an interdisciplinary and community oriented collaboration examining the changing nature of American childhood under neoliberalism. See http://www.reclaimingchildhood.org.

Recent books include: Crossing the Neoliberal Line: Pacific Rim Migration and the Metropolis, Life's Work: Geographies of Social Reproduction, A Companion to Political Geography, and Practicing Public Scholarship: Experiences and Possibilities beyond the Academy. She is currently tweeting, blogging, mapping, and co-authoring a mass market tract entitled Stealing Childhood Back with a poet and a child psychologist.