People after property: beyond relations of extraction

As I made my way through Sara Safransky’s compelling new book, The City after Property, it dawned on me that our paths are intertwined in a few surprising ways. She relates early in the prologue that she grew up in the Appalachian foothills of western North Carolina, struggling with questions of race, class and cultural belonging and how to understand this deeply multifaceted place in relation to processes of development and struggles of liberation happening elsewhere. Namely, it would come to pass, in Detroit, MI. I found this small meditation quite moving, as I started out life around the same time on the other side of those same mountains, in east Tennessee, and also often struggled with similar questions of belonging, place and relationality that she catalogs so beautifully. It makes me think about whether people who grow up searching for hidden histories in the places we come from might also share similar research motivations and penchants for blending our political and scholarly praxis.

Our next point of intersection happened decades later, in the summer of 2018, shortly after I had arrived in Detroit to research the wake of municipal debt and bankruptcy in the city. I was lucky enough to secure a meeting with Linda Campbell, a formative figure in Detroit’s social movement space, known particularly for her work with the Detroit People’s Platform on a community benefits agreement with city hall. We had a wonderful conversation, at the end of which she was unsurprised to hear that I was a geographer by training, in answer to her inquiry. Nodding in confirmation, she explained, “I’m already working with a geographer, Sara Safransky.”

The heart of Campbell and Safransky’s collaboration would turn out to be the 2020 co-edited collection, A People’s Atlas of Detroit (2020). Epistemologically in the tradition of the celebrated “Detroit Geographic Expedition” of a previous era (see Knudson, 2017 for more on the DGE), this edited collection brought together community voices with activist and academic analyses to produce a powerful countermapping project that included a compelling counternarrative of urban decline and (re)imagined urban futures for Motor City. Safransky has followed this up with The City after Property as a sole-authored contribution. Like A People’s Atlas, its analytical focus is also centered on understanding the origins of the decline in Detroit, what has come after, and what is yet to come. However, this time she interrogates the subject matter through questions about the changing role of property in urban development, and what she terms the “politics of abandonment”. She argues that deindustrialization is far more nuanced and related to the spatial reproduction of racial capitalism than traditional narratives of decline and associated technical solutionisms like “rightsizing” and “green” redevelopment allow for. Ultimately, Safransky is interested in understanding how the “unmaking” of a city happens, both in terms of recalibrating practices of property-making and -taking, as well as in regard to promising new geographies of mutual aid and community resourcing created in the liminal spaces and meantimes between the unmade and remade city.

Methodologically, she writes that she is using this book to further the collective research that was done for A People’s Atlas of Detroit. Here she relies on ethnographically inspired depictions of Detroit circa 2010-2014 paired with expert interviews with planners, city officials, staff, and NGO professionals, as well as interviews with organizers and residents. She also conducts extensive document and media analysis of planning projects both attempted and successfully carried out, along with strong elements of archival analysis, centered primarily on the build-up to and aftermath of the 1967 Detroit rebellion.

While most of the book is intended to engage practitioners and advanced academics interested in questions of urban decline, community-led resistance to (re)development pressures, and property regimes in transition, I would very much recommend Chapter two, On Our Own Ground, to anyone teaching an undergraduate urban studies course and looking for a fresh analysis on the rise and fall of the fordist city. Safransky deftly explains the racial politics behind the rise of the post-war suburbs and industrial reorganization from the perspective of Black Detroiters taking part in the struggle for fair housing and wages, with the story culminating in the 1967 rebellion. Here she manages to accessibly explain a very well-traveled road from a perspective that is rarely considered in introductory urban courses, integrating compelling archival and media data with ethnographic attention to detail.

With the exceptions of chapter two (above) and chapter five (discussed further below) which are both focused on explaining a specific conjunctural moment in time, the other chapters are oriented towards understanding how particular contemporary property-objects function as nodes in the reproduction of racial capitalist space and place in Detroit. Chapter one, Unbuilding a City, introduces the problematique at the heart of the book: the relationship between land use governance, notions of property, and racial equity. She puts forward the idea that property regimes are not predetermined but rather cultural products whose materiality changes over time, typically alongside economic transformations, and changes in legal conceptions of race (including contemporary “race neutral” notions). She uses the rest of the book to showcase how property regimes in Detroit have been and continue to be premised upon deeply embedded cultural assumptions of white supremacy and consequent prioritization of perceptions of white safety and comfort that she traces back to centuries-old settler-colonial logics that were first used to expunge Native inhabitants of the region. While she is at pains to highlight historical continuities in each of her chapters, it is in chapter six, Conjuring Terra Nullius, that she most forcefully shows how these settler logics and frontier myths are once again at work in the construction of a post-industrial “new” Detroit.

Altogether, chapters three, four, six, seven and eight are grounded in the analysis of particular mechanisms developed and deployed either by the city, state, or another vested interest in the attempt to reestablish a set of property relations that stabilize processes of accumulation and rising property values in Detroit. Chapter three, Stealing Home, analyses the role played by the “country’s largest tax-foreclosure auction” (2023, p. 57) for residential homes on the social fabric and homeownership patterns in Detroit. Chapter four discusses the White Picket Fence Program, a scheme meant to encourage development in certain parts of the city by incentivizing property owners to purchase neighboring lots at steeply discounted prices, reconfiguring notions of property rights and upsetting community practices of care in the process. Chapter six considers how the proliferation of maps depicting Detroit as empty or abandoned bolstered calls for addressing high rates of “vacancy” in the city, culminating in the Detroit Blight Removal Task Force Plan of 2014. This was countered by a community map depicting the city as rich in historic sites and community-oriented cultural hotspots, far from the vacant city depicted by developers and media. Chapter seven, Political Ecologies of Austerity, is about the performative power of a consultancy-designed Market Value Analysis (MVA) map of Detroit, in terms of determining which neighborhoods would continue to receive certain city services and which would not, while chapter eight, The Garden is a Weapon in the War, centers on the ambivalent role of urban agriculture in the city’s future. In each of these chapters Safransky carefully documents acts of resistance and counternarratives that are being voiced by Detroiters themselves, who recognize the violence being done to their city, neighborhoods, and homes as belonging to a larger historical epoch of racialized dispossession. Indeed, it is clear that while her analytical mission is to document how the rules of and role played by property are changing in Detroit, her heart is dedicated to creating an exposition of community-derived theory and experience-based prerogatives. She wants to archive how Detroiters have fought back.

Finally, my relationship with the people and city of Detroit picks up almost exactly where Safransky’s book ends – with the declaration of municipal insolvency and associated residential water shutoff crisis. Though we share similar methodological commitments to community, Safransky and I have approached studying the role of urban debt a bit differently. While I tend to focus on very clearly explaining mechanisms of extraction being put to work by financial actors that have been purposely made opaque (the details of bond arrangements for example), and then trying to show how their impacts are materially and emotionally felt on the ground, she does the inverse, placing more of an emphasis on highlighting relations rather than financial details. One thing we have in common however, is our insistence that predatory debt is always premised on preexisting relations of extraction and domination. In chapter five, Safransky dwells on the “politics of unpayable debt”. Unpayable debt on the part of a debtor is typically the reason bankruptcy is sought, however in this chapter, she foregrounds Detroit’s histories and geographies of racial extraction, framing those moments as being the debts truly in need of servicing, rather than the debt owed to global investors via predatory bonds. She manages to do this brilliantly by paralleling her narration of the intense period leading up to the declaration of financial emergency management with the unfolding of a truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) that was taking place at the same time in the city. The commission was designed to look into “regional racial segregation” with “the aim of easing racial antagonisms” (2023, p. 111). Using powerful testimonials from participants in both financial and truth and reconciliation processes to make her point, Safransky documents the uncomfortable encounter between adjudicates of liberal philosophy (in the form of both city council members and TRC commissioners), and residents of Detroit. Unlike both sets of representatives, city residents recognized not only that racial injustices perpetuated (and political legacies inherited) are debts owed, but that reconciliation is also less about settling this debt through forgiveness than it is about not forgetting what happened. In doing so Safransky opens up a larger conversation to be had regarding the role of collective memory, social debts and the role of reparations in urban processes that I look forward to seeing unfold in our field.

In all, Safransky has contributed an important book that has been written for and alongside the people of Detroit, but in service to anyone and everyone searching for ways to cultivate more just urban relations. It not only sheds light on how narratives of abandonment have become enrolled in the reconfiguration of accumulative property logics in the postindustrial city, but it is also an offering from both Safransky and the people of Detroit on how to work with the spaces and moments we are given, to breathe life into other ways of being together while and where we can.