Abstract
The City After Property opens with an appeal to understanding property as a moral issue, centring the ethics of urban land on questions of race and personhood, abandonment and belonging, reckoning and healing (p. xv). The book pursues its inquiries through chapters devoted to conceptualizing how Detroit has been ‘unbuilt’ through abandonment as a political project (Chapter 1, Epilogue) and a racialized property regime that manifests as rebellion (Chapter 2), tax foreclosure (Chapter 3), regime breakdown (Chapter 4), debt relations (Chapter 5), terra nullius (Chapter 6), austerity (Chapter 7), and land justice as symbolic and metabolic (Chapter 8). Along the way, readers are immersed in Detroit through extensive use of fieldwork that uncovers the struggles of a community grappling with loss more than emptiness (p. 10). The book is particularly strong for its methods, seamlessly connecting observation and oral accounts to scholarly and local debates.
In arguing that access to land is mediated by contested property formations shaped by culture, history, and race, (p. 5), After Property unites themes that cut across studies of political economy, urban development, and settler colonialism. It is an inspiring and aspirational book about Detroit and its property regime and about so much more than what any one subfield can do on its own. Land is brought to life, in more ways than one.
That the book is well written and does novel things with familiar topics are features of After Property that the reader will easily figure out for themselves. In preparing this review, I was tempted to focus, as the book does, on Detroit. Initially, I had intended to connect the themes of ownership, crisis, and bankruptcy (in all senses of these words), to the concept of ‘financialized urban governance’ proposed by Jamie Peck and I in ‘Financializing Detroit’ (2016). My reading of the book was quickly reorganized with the line in Chapter 1 urging political-economic analysis to extend its baseline beyond the twentieth century (p. 10). The ambition to uncover a deeper history of racialized capitalism, attuned to the unique temporal arrangements of the present and its precursors, resonates with my current research on proprietary settler colonialism (Whiteside 2022, 2023), where dynamics of property relations, the state, finance, and the construction of racialized settler community is pushed back to the earliest days of English North America.
After Property chides the glorified Roanoke of contemporary American primary school lore (p. xvi), but it is perhaps too quick to judgement on that front. ‘Property regime’, a concept central to this book, is said to enable ownership and specify relationships (p. 12), underpinned by ideas of rights and relations (p. 13). The book duly recognizes that the state and its laws are key to property relations and regimes; the book leaves under addressed how different forms of state, law, and property relations together created the racialized property regimes of present-day America.
Seeing what comes After Property requires vision for the future and insight into what came before. What came before capitalism, America, or Detroit offers a cautionary tale of the very origins of the property regime central to the book, a non-capitalist analogue of Detroit's ‘liminal or contested states of [land]ownership’ (p. 4). While this is in no way a critique of the book itself, I would like to use this forum to extend the conversation by asking: what was the city before capitalist property?
America began not as a country but as a town. Before a single ship sailed, the two Roanoke schemes of the 1580s were drawn up as a municipal plan under a land patent tellingly entitled the ‘Governour and Assistants of the Citie of Ralegh in Virginia’. Following these plans, two decades later, the Virginia colony centred on Jamestown was to feature common land, collective farming, and a central store to which indentured white settlers contributed their produce and from which they secured the necessaries of life (Craven 1949: 88–90). The vision for Jamestown differed from the immense slave plantation complex that would soon eclipse it. That Jamestown's central store, common land, and collective agriculture was exclusively owned by the English investors of the Virginia Company is also notable. The Company would manage the overseas trade and unfree (white) labour would harvest or exploit a resource desired by England. Indicated in a 1618 Virginia Company ledger of account, the Powhatan Indigenous peoples of the region were to be offered copper in exchange for their land (Kingsbury 1906: 99); indicated through the Massacre (or Uprising) of 1622, race relations organized through dispossession would never be so easily bought off.
Such was the vision for America and practice of proprietary settler colonialism at its earliest English origins. Proprietary land as company fiefdom followed the feudal tradition of county palatine as property regime, the only arrangement under medieval law where lord proprietors could be independent without challenging the absolute authority of the sovereign. So it was for lands ringing le détroit (the straights) connecting Lake Huron to Lake Erie when taken from the French in 1763.
Detroit colony, like Detroit city, saw a progression of settler colonial property rights regimes: the seigneurial system of New France (evidenced today through city street names and orientation to the river), as English Crown land in the British Empire, later the national domain of the United States, then the treaty lands agreed to by Washington and Indigenous peoples – treaties that tacitly acknowledged Indigenous sovereignty through a formalized transfer of property rights, swamped by the subsequent deluge of white settlers into Michigan (1837) leading to Indigenous land seizure and displacement. By 1860, two decades after Michigan was created, more than half of the 26 million acres making up Michigan's Lower Peninsula were privatized through disposal at auction (Mitchell 2008, 122). Right from the start, public land disposal (intentionally) encouraged land speculation by large individual and corporate buyers, not the settler-farmer of American mythology (Mitchell 2008: 143–146). Public land privatization, in an ironic twist that will not be lost on those who study contemporary neoliberalization, required a significant build-up of federal and state institutions to handle land surveys, credit, auctions, and patents.
Four hundred years after Sir Humphrey Gilbert attempted the first English North American colony (St John's, Newfoundland, 1583), another Gilbert reminds us that investor-owned fiefdoms are hardly a thing of the past. In the midst of Detroit's 2013 bankruptcy, billionaire Daniel Gilbert was made co-chair of the Blight Removal Task Force and began buying up Detroit, coming to own two million square feet of downtown (p. 144), a dramatic indicator of abandonment as political project and speculative endeavour underpinned by dispossession, as argued in After Property. And a reminder that English settler colonial companies were but the ‘first in a long line … to use generous land grants as a means of underwriting the speculative business of American development’ (Craven 1949: 37).
Sir Humphrey Gilbert left a marker to claim England's New-found-land, Daniel Gilbert leaves his mark through a private police force and hundreds of security cameras. Daniel Gilbert's slogan is ‘See Detroit Like We Do’ (p. 145), After Property responds through its own photos, etymologies, and legends. The visual imagery in the book is poignant and used to dramatic effect: the botany of urban decay, from ruin porn and eviction dots to the telling mutations of à-bandon-ment and le nain rouge. Detailing the reinvigoration of le nain rouge, the New France settler myth resuscitated in 2011 for Detroit's ‘new starters’, the book beautifully centres land ownership folktales as echo for linked forms of historical and contemporary racialized dispossession. From the banks of the red stick of Baton Rouge, French colonial settlers came to populate le détroit as of 1701. The red nain and red stick are but two hints of an almost transhistorical colonial project dripping ‘with blood and dirt’ (Marx 1977: 926).
Almost transhistorical. After Property is, as mentioned, an aspirational book as much as it is a critique. As the title itself urges, the book closes with an appeal to decommodification. After property comes the privileging of collective identities; after property comes land as life lived not thing sold. This book review adds that there is an opportunity here to reconnect with what came before capitalist property. What does it mean for America that the politics of both late-feudal Jamestown and post-industrial Detroit turn on racialized property rights regimes of private land ownership? At the very least, this binary across economic forms requires that hopes for a future after property vanquish the visions of what made North America in the first place.
