Banks on a plane: The possibilities and limits of spatial accessibility measures for understanding geographies of financial exclusion

This paper examines how the underlying assumptions of geospatial accessibility metrics impact their representation of social and spatial relations and how these assumptions ultimately produce differing understandings of financial exclusion and its geographies. As increasing scholarly and public attention has been paid to the role of policy and institutions in (re)producing racial inequality in the United States, the role of the financial and banking system has taken on a particular importance. While conventional banking services offer the foundations of economic opportunity through savings and credit, these institutions have rarely been spatially uniform in their distribution or equally available to all classes of people. Instead, the growth of alternative financial services (or AFS) has sought to target those left out of the conventional banking system, offering higher interest and often predatory lines of credit to already marginalized people and communities. In order to examine financial exclusion and its geographies, this paper maps both banks and AFS in the Atlanta metropolitan region using five different methods for measuring spatial accessibility. Ultimately, while each of these five methods reveals a bifurcated pattern of financial exclusion across the metro where wealthier, whiter areas have higher access to banks and lower access to AFS and poorer, predominantly Black areas have relatively little access to banks and higher concentrations of AFS, each method produces a somewhat different picture of this process and its geography, calling attention to the role that such metrics play in shaping our collective understandings of racial inequality and how it to address it.