The City after Property: Abandonment and Repair in Postindustrial Detroit

by Sara Safransky

In The City after Property , Sara Safransky examines how postindustrial decline generates new forms of urban land politics. In the 2010s, Detroit government officials classified a staggering 150,000 lots—more than a third of the city—as “vacant” or “abandoned.” Analyzing subsequent efforts to shrink the Motor City’s footprint and budget, Safransky presents a new way of conceptualizing urban abandonment. She challenges popular myths that cast Detroit as empty along with narratives that reduce its historical decline to capital and white flight. In connecting contemporary debates over neoliberal urbanism to Cold War histories and the lasting political legacies of global movements for decolonization and Black liberation, she foregrounds how the making of—and challenges to—modern property regimes have shaped urban policy and politics. Drawing on critical geographical theory and community-based ethnography, Safransky shows how private property functions as a racialized construct, an ideology, and a moral force that shapes selves and worlds. By thinking the city “after property,” Safransky illuminates alternative ways of imagining and organizing urban life.

Genres: Nonfiction

328 pages, Hardcover

Published August 15, 2023

About the author

Sara Safransky is a human geographer and assistant professor at Vanderbilt University.

Reviews

[Logan Cimino · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I’ve ever read. Safransky does an amazing job at contextualizing the history of Detroit since the early 2000s through a progressive lens. Her critical analysis of the decline of Black homeownership and the Black middle class in Detroit, the Wayne County auction, the Marche du Nain Rouge, the Market Value Analysis, and the Hantz Farms development were all quite sound, evidence backed, and easy to follow. At the same time, Safransky also does an effective job at showing that Detroiters, despite the politics of austerity and racial capitalism in 21st century Southeast Michigan, are re-imagining new landscapes of liberation and progress through love and radical repair. I especially found Safransky’s analysis of what it means to be “vacant”, to be “abandoned”, and to be “livable” to be thought provoking. I highly recommend this book to planners, urban historians, and anyone interested in the relationship between Detroit and its metropolitan area.

[Kristina Gibson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent urban ethnography, covers a wide range of social/historical/political issues with land rights and property in Detroit.