Towards a world of “living otherwise” in The City after Property

With lucid storytelling, flowing prose, and rich historical contextualization of a city that has been, contradictorily, both ignored and over-analyzed, Sara Safransky has produced a text that is a must-read. Among the many works that attempt to understand the puzzle of Detroit, The City after Property stands out as one that offers an accessible window into the contradictions and potential for a city that represents larger struggles for our collective future. This is a future not just of surviving crisis, but one that is ripe with the hope of, as Safransky writes, “living otherwise” (Safransky, 2023, p. 189). This is a vision that, as she shows, builds on an already-existing model for a city worth defending that has been emergent and cultivated in Detroit for decades, particularly among Black Detroiters.

In my comments, I’ll focus on a few key things that make the book sing. First, Safransky uses a long historical lens to explain the geographic present, and this anchors her storytelling in important ways. Next, her attention to the ways that race and racism are mobilized through land struggles reveals property’s central role in racial capitalism. Finally, I want to draw attention to her methods, particularly where she embeds community-engagement into her fieldwork in a way that brings the collectivity of her subjects into her own analysis.

One of the terrible dilemmas of the contemporary moment is that of how to repair the damage wrought by centuries of racism across various groups, given that communities may have competing needs, particularly when it comes to land. The call to return land to Black people dispossessed by redevelopment in Detroit, for example, could conflict with a call to repair the impacts of other displacements, particularly Indigenous communities that faced repeated forced removal through colonization and urbanization. Safransky carefully deals with this challenge by holding the long history of Detroit as an integral part of recent patterns of displacement, while linking those patterns to longer legacies of rebellion, resistance, and imagination.

In a powerful chapter on what she describes as “unpayable debt,” for example, Safransky tells the story of the 2012 struggle over Detroit’s fiscal crisis, where the state moved in, pressing for a political and fiscal takeover that would accelerate the shrinkage of the city and its services. As she walks us through various local meetings about the crisis, we’re brought into the politics of the moment, including how various groups have been blamed for Detroit’s struggles. But then Safransky steps back, as she does in nearly every chapter, to widen the story that she tells to help us see links to the historical dynamics of racial capitalism. “There is a damning throughline,” she writes, “from enslaved people being forced to purchase their own freedom to sharecropping to high-interest loans to the racialized geographies of debt that precipitated the application of emergency management in Michigan” (Safransky, 2023, p. 107).

Safransky then takes us on a journey through theories of reconciliation: How can one begin to think about payment for unpayable debts? Can our individual stories produce a collective path forward that could resolve those horrible histories? One part of the answer, Safransky tells us, is in the careful act of retelling history. “Remembrance – or the act of remembering,” she writes, “is about more than revisiting past events. It is also about deciding how the narrative relationship among events is established” (Safransky, 2023, p. 109). With this in mind, Safransky then shares nuggets from community hearings that show the entanglement of many groups and their dispossessions. A panelist at one event speaks about removal from the Wabanaki reservation and the abuses that followed; later, we hear stories of rapid White flight, which sharpened the racial and economic segregation of the city, as capital flight deepened its poverty; still later we learn about the shortened life expectancies for the majority-Black community who stayed as their city shrank around them.

These and other stories become layered together across the book to offer a sense of a tapestry of life: While Black Detroiters have faced particular challenges that are ongoing, these struggles are part of something much larger, about oppression and the use of land-based strategies that exclude and stratify communities through manipulations of property. At the same time, land-based strategies against property are also at the center of community counter-stories. Even the urban rebellions of the 1960s, which are often painted largely as moments of rage, are clarified to also be centered around political claims to land and place.

And this is one of Safransky’s gifts to us. In her hand, the stories of Detroit, now and in the past, are thick with larger meaning. She continually points us beyond the facts of any given story to the ways that people wrestle meaning out of what they know of those stories, and how that meaning-making process then shapes struggles for justice in Detroit. She urges us to look for the ways in which such myths “index society’s consciousness of itself and shared interpretations of the animating crises of different historical moments” (Safransky, 2023, p. 177). That is, Safransky asks what the histories that people keep alive say about a communities’ commitments to a kind of livingness, or living otherwise. This comes through when she teaches us about the rise of the Marche du Nain Rouge (what some call a gentrification march), when she investigates the power of new algorithmically-driven maps (with a troubling echo of redlining), and as we learn the story of the city’s truth commission, which offered a brief hope for racial reconciliation.

In enacting this search for meaning, The City after Property does important work in breaking open some of the central myths of Detroit, from its idealized history as a hearth of capitalism, to its strangely glamorous life as a graveyard of industrialism, when images of crumbling structures woven through with weeds and vines travelled the internet. Those widely-circulated images perpetuated the notion of Detroit as a fading metropole, faced with perhaps naturally-occurring urban shrinkage. In fact, as Safransky shows, Detroit – the place and the people – has been actively abandoned through strategies of capital that make it freshly available for re-valorization. Manipulations of property are central to this production of abandonment, as with the plan to turn vacant land into farms or forests, specifically to create a scarcity of property that might raise land values. Property, she argues, is both a material process that shapes the landscape and an ideological one, crafting our sense of civic obligation and national identity. This civic sense, Safransky reminds us, was deeply unequal from the beginning, from the Indian Removal Acts that enabled United States expansion, to urban redevelopment programs that targeted Black Detroit neighborhoods for removal, to the fiscal takeover that residents viewed as “an attempt to loot the collective Black legacy of Detroit” (Safransky, 2023, p. 105).

So what does it mean to imagine the city “after property,” as Safransky frames it? To understand this, we can look to the city of care that Detroiters have produced in their work to create far more than just livability. Safransky writes about neighborhood-level caretaking (whether tending yards of empty homes to fend of municipal managers who sought to identify areas that could be cut off from services, or developing new institutions, including Black bookstores, community-centered gardens, and clinics) as a kind of community placemaking and worldbuilding. She explains that, “the practices of neighborhood care functioned not simply as stopgap measures. They were efforts to prefigure a more just city. As Detroit faced fiscal crisis and economic structuring, it was this vision and city that residents sought to defend” (Safransky, 2023, p. 102).

As she takes us through Detroit, Safransky shares some of her process as a scholar through her narrative. Early on, she describes her participation in a community-based oral history project with Detroit activists, which results in an archive of interviews and a series of workshops. This trove of data became the basis for a documentary film and a wonderful book, A People’s Atlas of Detroit (Campbell et al., 2020). These community-driven efforts represent a collective set of counternarratives for understanding the city’s fault lines of race and class, and for imagining a way out of its long-term crisis, foregrounding the human needs of Black Detroiters. Chapters in the Atlas offer maps of slavery (even in Detroit) and resistance, a community-based vision of urban land as a commons, and an analysis of displacement that goes beyond gentrification to think through community rootedness to land as a counterpoint to capitalist property relations. Safransky’s participation in this community-based research shapes The City after Property and makes her an even more authoritative narrator; we can see her rootedness in the community. And when she walks the reader into community meetings, interviews with developers or activists, or simply on a stroll down a historic street, you can feel her respect and care for the people she shared space and time with during her research.

We don’t leave The City after Property knowing exactly how to reconcile the problems that face Detroit, but we see it as a collective challenge. Safransky shows that this challenge involves reckoning with the ways that White supremacy is embedded in the social, economic and geographic formations of cities through the property system, and one that demonstrates how a study of a single city can reveal these much-larger connections. It’s also a story that, as Safransky argues, offers the potential for a spiritual awakening, with a vision of life beyond private property and the strictures of racial capitalism that it serves. A key piece of this spiritual guidance comes from the teachings of James and Grace Lee Boggs, who are foundational theorists for this book. As they wrote in 1966, “the war is not only in America’s cities. It is for these cities” (Boggs & Boggs, cited in Safransky, 2023, p. 38). With this, the reader is invited to participate in making the “city after property,” a place that is built through reciprocal relationships of care and work, and which eschews practices of extraction, whether of capital or of stories.