The City after Property

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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. Sara Safransky explores how Detroit’s recent classification of over one-third of the city’s land as vacant or abandoned represents conflicting and complex understandings of property, foregrounding how the making of—and challenges to—modern property regimes have shaped urban policy and politics. Sara Safransky is a geographer and Assistant Professor in the Department of Human and Organizational Development at Vanderbilt University. She is coeditor of A People’s Atlas of Detroit. Abbreviations  ix
Acknowledgments  xi
Prologue  xv
1. Unbuilding a City  3
2. On Our Own Ground  23
3. Stealing Home  57
4. White Picket Fences  85
5. Accounting for Unpayable Debt  103
6. Conjuring Terra Nullius  123
7. Political Ecologies of Austerity  149
8. The Garden Is a Weapon in the War  169
Epilogue. Reconstructing the World  197
Notes  201
Bibliography  259
Index  291

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