On writing The City afterProperty

Where else to begin than with thanks? Thank you, Rachel Brahinsky, tamika l. butler, Mia Dawson, Nathan McClintock, and Sage Ponder. Thank you for your work, your care, your intellectual generosity, and for helping me see The City after Property (2023) in new ways. Thank you to Urban Geography’s book review editor Julie Ren for organizing this necessary conversation on race and property in urban geography. The reviews cover much ground and signal exciting ways of carrying the dialogue forward. In considering what I might add, this rejoinder engages the reviewers’ comments to reflect on the choices urban geographers make when we read and write the city.

Many geographers write books – great books – but books are not as central to the field as they are to, say, history or anthropology. When Ren became the book review editor for Urban Geography, she wrote an inaugural editorial to uplift the value of book writing (2023). Books matter to geography, Ren argued, and, more specifically, to urban geography. They allow scholars to delve deep into a subject area, solidifying knowledge and expertise while expanding the boundaries of subfields. And yet, the temporality of book writing is increasingly out of step with the reward structure of academia, where publishing is a means to employability. This means increasing demands on graduate students, junior scholars, and the precariously employed to publish quickly or perish – that is, to not write books.

When Ren reached out with the forum invitation in June 2023, I was excited. I had just sent off the final proofs to the publisher and was glad to no longer be toiling with the minutiae of late-stage publishing. I hoped the book would be read widely. At the same time, I felt unmoored.

For over a decade, I had been working and thinking with Detroiters and writing about the city. The work began with Uniting Detroiters Project, a community-based participatory research project that took place in the early 2010s and yielded a volume called A People’s Atlas of Detroit (2020) and the documentary A People’s Story of Detroit (2015). Alongside these projects and after them, I tended to The City after Property. My work on it tethered me to a daily practice of working through ideas as I crisscrossed the country, as I became a mother and a teacher, as my babies grew lanky. This routine yielded half-finished paragraphs, often on too little sleep, and jottings scribbled in odd places.

The American novelist EL Doctorow notes, “Writing a book is like driving a car at night. You only see as far as your headlights go, but you can make the whole trip that way.” As I made this journey, the manuscript was never far from my mind, nor my person. On road trips, I kept it in arm’s reach, to read aloud to my partner. As I reached for the newest pages, he’d meet me with a sidelong glance (really, now?), then oblige, listening generously for off-key sentences while navigating to kids’ soccer games, on vacations, and through my roaming mind. Over the years, this routine shaped the manuscript. It also shaped me. It is no wonder, then, that I found myself grieving its absence as I tried to anchor myself with new work.

As the publication date approached, I experienced twinges of apprehension. If the book garnered reviews, would I want to read them? Should authors read reviews? Many writers unequivocally say, no. Book reviews are for readers, not writers. Stay away from Goodreads. Don’t go near Amazon. Social media is a danger zone. If you want opinions about your work, seek out someone you trust.

What a gift, then, to receive reviews from scholars whose opinions I valued. As I pored over tamika’s and Sage’s and Rachel’s and Mia’s and Nathan’s commentaries, I was reminded of what the Irish theologian John O’Donohue (2008) says about the beauty and joy of a good conversation. Two monologues often pass for conversation in our culture, he says, but, in a good conversation you find yourself saying things you didn’t know you knew. It takes you to another plane and sings in your head for weeks after.

The reviews draw readers in and out of key arguments in The City after Property. Collectively, they form a chorus reminding readers of the possibilities and promises of an urban geography concerned with liberation. They challenge us, in the words of tamika l. butler (2024), to listen, learn, and follow the lead of Black people. They insist on attention to Black geographies and how liberatory spaces always have and will continue to exist in the face of racial capitalism and settler colonialism. They ask us to think about what we notice and sense when we read and write the city? What do we inventory and record and archive? How do our accountings shape the stories we tell?

Somewhere in the gaping middle years of writing The City after Property, I began seeking guidance on the craft of writing. I dabbled in creative writing in college, but my graduate training had left me largely unprepared to write a book. Like most geography departments, mine did not offer writing classes. I had taken only one – an elective, half-credit class in the sociology department where we read The Power of Writing (1998) by Peter Elbow and Bird by Bird (1995) by Anne Lamott, among other works. As I attempted to move The City after Property forward a decade later, I returned to those books and their reminders – Elbow’s encouragement to trust my non-linear writing process, Lamott’s instructions on quieting my inner critic.

I also sought out new works and opportunities to listen to writers talk about their practice. I joyfully stumbled upon the literary podcast Between the Covers. Hosted by David Naimon, the podcast offers long-form, in-depth conversations with novelists, poets, and scholars. Naimon is an incomparable interviewer. He prepares extensively, reading deeply across his guest’s body of work and asking questions that move writers to think about their work in relationship to literature, politics, society, and life.

In one episode, the poet Victoria Chang (2023) observes that while most people think they are going to MFA programs to learn how to write, most of the learning happens in the journey of trying to learn how to write—as she puts it, this is “the journey of living. It’s a journey of growing. It’s a journey of dying, which is really the same as the journey of living.” Writing The City after Property was one such journey. I often felt less like a writer and more like an apprentice, trying to learn from the collective knowledge of Detroiters what it meant for them and for their city to live, to grow, to die, and to live again.

In writing The City after Property, I wanted to retell the story of Detroit from the perspective of those who had sought to break with the propertied logics in people and land that have long structured racial capitalism and the racial state. In the book, Detroiters offer rich theorizations of the city from below. Their collective knowledge speaks into resounding silences in urban studies and raises critical questions about where we to turn to for theory. As this forum’s contributors underscore, they offer collective knowledge that is rooted in traditions of Black radical thought and practice. It is knowledge that has been and continues to be passed on through intergenerational dialogue. It is plotted, as McClintock (2024) reminds us, materially and metaphysically. It is carried forward by radical visions for urban transformation, which as Dawson (2024) writes, can be found in “unsanctioned assertions” of self-determination, collectivity, mutual aid, communal land, transnational solidarity, and the abolition of police and property. These assertions teach us something important, as Brahinsky (2024) writes about “communities’ commitments to a kind of livingness, or living otherwise.”

In writing The City after Property, I often thought about how to write into such commitments. What would it mean to write against – to not repeat in form or content – the violent logics and abstractions of property itself? As I tried to make words bend to that which I could not yet name, I found myself returning again and again to the world-building practices of Detroiters – to their stories of liberation, to the ways they talked about everyday forms of resistance and refusal, to their expression of desire, and to what they saw as possible. This practice of returning to “community-derived theory and experience-based prerogatives,” to borrow Ponder’s (2024) words, was a process of archiving within the pages of the book not only the possibilities of different urban futures but different urban presents. This forum reminds us that writing is an action and that we all might yet participate in writing the city after property.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.