Abstract
The City after Property conducts an ethnographic-sociological investigation to address the issue of property abandonment in the city of Detroit. It seeks to demonstrate the functioning of a ‘politics of abandonment’ (p. 17) by combining extensive empirical inquiry with a composite theoretical framework.
The book updates the ‘mythology’ (p. xviii) of Detroit by means of concepts and notions that are closely aligned with the field of research concerned with critical race and postcolonial theories. This combination (not explicitly stated but evident in many parts of the book) highlights important problems and introduces new ones. The narrative is dense, but the reading is easy.
The book is divided into eight chapters, and can be summarized as follows. The book opens by suggesting that ruination of post-industrial cities can be useful for re-examining the concept of ‘property’ in its social, political, and moral variants (chap. 1). The dismantling and removal of city assets in Detroit are linked to issues of ‘racialized poverty’ (p. 3), a problem sedimented in the history of Detroit and in which property abandonment mirrors ‘unequal power relations, urban segregation, and the spatial isolation of African Americans’ (p. 41). Various discriminatory strategies, which provoked forms of social uprising in the city of Detroit during the second half of the 20th century (chap. 2), are unresolved problems further magnified by the outbreak of the financial crisis in the early 2000s (chap. 3). The problem of surplus abandoned land and structures, and the failed attempts to encourage their caretaking (chap. 4), lead to the conclusion that abandonment is a punishment for local communities (p. 113; and, in general, chap. 5). This is somehow connected with the long history of land disputes and colonization in the frontier area where Detroit is located (chap. 6). The failure of recent austerity measures to provide robust regeneration strategies (chap. 7) is offset by the ability to reorganize community living through the strength of perseverance and mutual trust in the local community (chap. 8).
Overall, the book is full of suggestions on how to avoid repeating certain mistakes. Better urban policies should prevent discriminatory acts perpetrated by local actors and administrators (e.g. block busting, redlining, wrongly assigned flipper taxes, induced complacency between federal housing interventions and real estate developers; chaps. 2–4). The fact that certain ‘emergency managers’ in the USA (emphatically referred to as ‘mini-dictators’; p. 105) can override the choices of elected representatives, with the power to change budgets without legislative approval, is a serious problem.
While agreeing with the denunciation of property abandonment as a form of ‘betrayal’ (p. 13) of the universalistic discourse on property (in ensuring, e.g. social well-being, citizenship, security), having problems with properties does not necessarily demand thinking of a city after property. The theme of abandonment (of artefacts, land, entire cities) requires special attention from social theory. The conventional and formal meanings of concepts attached to ‘abandonment’ naturally convey different ideas of how ‘ownership’ and ‘responsibility’ are performed in light of certain rules of the game (De Franco, 2022).
This book adds another critical issue to this discussion: that of the ‘liability’ and/or ‘accountability’ of deleterious processes around property abandonment (chap. 3–5; especially p. 75). The fact that in Detroit, as in many other cities, property taxation is particularly high and increasing (even in comparison to other cities; p. 77) is possibly the main reason for the deadlock that the author describes as ‘a “flaw” in free-market ideology’ (p. 8). However, the problems described suggest more a flaw in official regulations and measures. Visibly, there are various problems stemming from what could be called an oppressive moralistic tribalism; however, over-emphasising the violent, material, racist nature of group interactions generates some epistemic risks.
First, there is the risk of interpreting phenomena within a strongly binary framework. Suggesting that there could be a relationship between ‘Black indebtedness’ (p. 58) or ‘Black debt’ in service of ‘white wealth’ (p. 107), or ‘how the value of whiteness is predicated on the devaluation of Blackness’ (p.163), seems too straightforward as a conclusion. This would not only fuel ‘Racial hysteria’ (p. 42). It would also lead to disregard of the fact that the latest financial crises had impacted globally on all types of families and labour sectors.
Second, there is the risk of deriving conclusions by switching effects with causes. Asserting that the banking credit system profits from the inability to pay of debtors (p. 107) may result from careful observation of the impacts of misguided policies; but assuming that this could be a premise seems paradoxical (investment-wise). It is clear that the critical intent is to reveal forms of ‘spatial politics of racial capitalism’ (p. 37) which could also be framed, equally critically, as forms of ‘neo-feudalism’ (Kotkin, 2020).
The third risk is that of partly disengaging with the empirical facts that stimulated the curiosity and the overall discussion. The author writes that ‘Detroit's abandonment is not merely an outcome of flight. Rather, it is an active strategy of racialized model of governance’ (p. 17); in this way, the investigation is conducted in reverse. In this recollection process, it is necessary to give justice also to the positive elements emerging from those inter-group interactions (e.g. the alliances, cooperation, diplomacy, and trusteeship mentioned in chap. 6: pp. 126–131) that could be crucial for contemporary Detroit.
The book succeeds in its aim of proving the ‘local but systemic state-led process of unmaking Black homeownership’ (p. 58). These issues of socio-spatial injustice suggest pushing for models of progressive land policy and ecologically just forms of urbanism (p. xv; and, in general, chap. 8). Nevertheless, one may also underline that sense of burden and powerlessness relates to the fact that deleterious processes seem precisely ‘state-led’. They are therefore legitimized, teleocratic, pervasive, and descend from unidirectional imperium (Russell, 1938). If the authorities in Detroit have carried out heavy utility shutoffs for non-payment of taxes, then it is better to avoid depicting ‘fiscal disobedience’ (p. 80) as a form of civil disobedience à la Thoreau. A less risky and more robust response for the residents would be to stop public authorities taking legal possession of others’ properties (through tax reversion; p. 68), especially if the authorities do not actively care about their re-allocation to local users. If the problem in Detroit is the surplus of unused lands and buildings, then why restrict access to incentives by existing small property owners (p. 95)? What many would denounce as a denial of equal development opportunities may instead reflect an unequal prospect of reward or success. It does not require specialized knowledge to recognize that any population exposed to problems such as water and electricity shortages, crimes against their own persons and properties, does not have a strong incentive to be engaged with local development. What prevents administrators from sustaining those who already live and operate locally? Perhaps the fact that large urban projects are seen as offering a better chance to provide (through negotiation) collective benefits which are difficult to guarantee via other means (such as relying on the private sector alone; see Berglund, 2021). The critical issue here is not only exposing causalities (not to be confused with faults), nor to establish who are the ‘disproportionally affected’ victims. Rather, the critical issue is the assumption of acting in a static world, where ‘benefits’ or ‘change’ must be added (Sowell, 2004).
By contrast, that ‘tremendous capacity for self-realization and horizontal mobilization’ (p. 93) seems linked to the idea that ‘capacity and power are generated by people being accountable to place’ (p. 191). Where some see limitations inherent in local development programmes as a reason for a radical reform, others may detect a slowly emergent will to reconcile with, rather than moving away from, a sense of self and property.
