Abstract
How do you unbuild a city? Sara Safransky's wide-ranging book about land and property in postindustrial Detroit begins by examining the premise of this question, a question that has vexed many city planners looking to resolve the problem of abandonment and deindustrialization in rust belt cities. What they usually mean, in the context of Detroit, is: how to scale back a city infrastructure designed for more than 2 million people when less than a million actually live there? Even more specifically, this is framed as a question of finance: how to make a city, a majority Black city, depopulated of many of those with capital, function for capital.
Safransky interviews city planners and administrators to lay bare the logic behind this question, and the strategies that have been used to reclaim the space of the city for capital, which have resulted in overwhelming waves of Black displacement and dispossession. She outlines the ways that technologies like the online city land bank auction depersonalize and make frictionless the violent process of taking someone's home. She describes policy tactics like the White Picket Fence Program, which functioned to reiterate and reinscribe property ideologies in a city in which property was increasingly not the only way residents related to the mass amounts of vacant land in the city.
These descriptions of innovations to reiterate property systems in the city are interwoven with testimonies and projects and analyses by Detroit residents to resist this mass dispossession of land, of homes, and of ways of being in the city. They argue: If much of Detroit's long crisis of municipal debt is rooted in industrial and residential abandonment, caused in large part by racist white flight out of the city, why is it that then the people that bear the brunt of the burden of somehow repaying that debt are the people, majority Black, that stayed? Why is Detroit's debt framed as its to owe, rather than as a debt to the city, reparations owed to Detroiters for systematic racist looting of its wealth? These questions lie under the surface of the fundamental criticism that Safransky and many of the Detroiters that she interviews have of planners’ framing of the why and the how of unbuilding the city.
So why should we care about the loaded question of how to unbuild Detroit? Or even more, why does Detroit, and this book, matter?
In grad school—I went to school in Los Angeles—I remember being questioned as to what Detroit has to do with anyone else. Sure, it's interesting—all the abandonment, the ruins, the romantic history—but really, what does all of that have to do with us here in L.A., where every scrap of land seems to be claimed and privatized. Is anything that happens in Detroit, which is so exceptional, generalizable?
Detroit is often portrayed as an exceptional city—and it is in many ways. It is exceptional in the scale of the boom-and-bust cycles of investment and abandonment, the grandiosity of its capitalist ambitions which can still be seen in the opulence of the gold-gilded Fox Theater and the mansions lining Iroquois St., and it is exceptional in the visual cataclysm of much of that grandiosity now crumbling in abandoned ruin. As Safransky notes, it is often narrated as the abandoned city. It is exceptional in the condensed and catastrophic loss of Black wealth and security that has taken place in the city, through white flight and plummeting home values, through mass foreclosure, water shut-offs, and eviction. And it is also an exceptional city of vision, of movements, a gathering of life choices of hundreds of thousands of Black people and others seeking success and refuge, individually and collectively, to create spaces of home, of safety, of self-determination, and joy. This is the city that spurned the Revolutionary Union Movements of the 1960s and 70s, which melded Black power with radical labor organizing. It is where Malcolm X led the Nation of Islam's Temple Number One. Dr. King first gave his “I Have a Dream” speech in Detroit, after walking with 125,000 people down Woodward Avenue.
So why should Detroit matter outside of its very specific context? For me, the answer is this: Its extraordinariness has made Detroit a place of experiments. It is certainly an experimental place for capital, as Safransky carefully outlines in detail and in scope the various policy and technological innovations wielded toward Black dispossession. And it is also a place where, as the failures of racial capitalism are laid especially bare, activists, organizers, and residents think up, dream, and experiment with what we might call otherways: Otherways of prioritizing what it means to live a good life. Otherways of thinking about what it might mean for a city to be secure, successful, vibrant. Otherways of relating to land and place. Some of this experimentation is formal, taking place in the context of community organizing, meetings, protests, and grassroots institution-building. Some of this is quotidian, the kinds of adaptations that everyday people make to living in a city that has a tremendous amount of land, skills, creativity, and aspirations, but certainly does not function well in the sense of city services. Safransky outlines these grassroots experiments as well, describing the ways that Detroiters envision and build a city otherwise—in urban agriculture centered on Black self-determination, in collective care practices, and in land stewardship. All of these reveal “a city that was rooted in radical relationality, a city built from collective daily practices of care, a city where Black life flourished—a city after property” (Safransky, 2023: 191).
The City after Property is a book about Detroit, but it is also about what Detroit can teach all of us who are living in cities that are unaffordable, privatized, and profoundly unequal.
How do we unbuild a city? It's a question that should challenge us all as we live in cities that are unlivable for increasing numbers of people, where sweeps evict people from parks while an investment class oligopoly controls access to housing for increasing numbers of people.
However, by unbuild, we cannot mean what the technocrats that Safransky interviews mean. As she demonstrates, the question asked in its standard formation in Detroit mainly works to facilitate the kind of violence that has always characterized racial capitalism. Rather, I mean how might we unbuild the structures and logics that lead to these kinds of urban violences? How do we contend with the ways that these logics—colonial, racial—are indeed at the core of how cities came to be?
Abolitionist Mariame Kaba is often quoted as arguing that we need not one grand solution but a movement of a million experiments (Kisslinger and Williams, 2021). Detroit is exceptional, in its culture of experiments. Ruth Wilson Gilmore notes that places undergoing capitalist crisis can in fact be some of the most generative of creative experiments, can be especially “open to the possibility for people to organize themselves to novel resolutions” (Gilmore, 2008: 36), even as people work within the obvious constraints of their circumstances. Detroit is, inarguably, one of those places.
And we can all learn from these—from the results of these experiments, and also from their audacity, from the dreams behind them.
The activists, urban farmers, and community workers whose insight Safransky seeks are not infallible. But a pure, uncomplicated success is not the point. They are trying, experimenting, in ways that are as concrete as vegetable shoots in soil and as symbolic as a two-minute public testimony spoken to an unyielding municipal financial review board.
Even the symbolic, the efforts that don't halt the steamroller of dispossession, the losses—they matter. These forms of truth-telling, even without reconciliation, assert refusal, which itself insists that a logic of financialization, capital, and property, is not the only possible logic. Undergirding the various forms of dispossession in the city is a constant refrain that there is no other way. As Safransky notes, all the counter-narratives, the experimentation, and the refusals evoke a possibility of another world, another city, another way of being and doing. And this possibility is backed up by all of the ways that Detroiters show us through relating to land in ways other than investment property—through sacred genealogies of freedom seeking, as life-giving soil, as home, and on and on. Other ways of doing a city, of being a city are possible. We know this can be done because Detroiters are doing it.
