Rejoinder: The City after Property

Book review forums are gifts. Thus, I want to begin by expressing gratitude to Dialogues in Urban Research's book review editor Ugo Rossi for the invitation to participate in this one and for his corralling of reviewers. I also want to thank the reviewers for their generous engagement. Rossi started organizing this forum back in June 2023, months before The City after Property was released. The reviews finally came to me in mid-January 2024 at the start of a busy academic semester. Rossi and I settled on a month timeline for me to pen a response. A week before the response was due, he checked in to see if I might be able to deliver it early. Early? No. Life had piled up. Snow and ice had shuttered my young kids’ schools for over a week. My parents were aging and needed help. My students faced crises. The days felt shrunken, too short to do it all. I needed a couple of days grace. Worried that my delay would throw the production schedule, I drafted a hasty email to Rossi. An early delivery was impossible, but I would be fine, I said, if the reviews stood alone, without my rejoinder. Rossi's response was prompt and direct. The rejoinder was not optional but rather central to the mission of Dialogues. He expected mine soon.

Wearily, I cleared my desk. The jazz great Duke Ellington famously quipped, “I don’t need time, I need a deadline.” My father, an editor who spent his life working under deadlines, had scrawled this quote on a 3 × 5 index card for me years ago. In moments like this I turn to it for solace. Daunted by the rejoinder genre—a sharp, witty, or critical response to a question, remark, or objection—I stared at the blank page. I didn’t feel particularly witty, so I started scrolling through back issues of Dialogues, a task made easy given that there were only three. The journal debuted in March 2023 with the aim of fostering “open and critical debate on the philosophical, methodological and pedagogic foundations of urban theory and praxis.” Commentaries and author responses—as Rossi had intimated—are the journal's glue. Through carefully crafted introductions to each issue, the editors reflected on the challenges of interdisciplinary engaged dialogue and their aspirations to provide a platform that would help break silos. Wit still felt elusive, but I sensed kinship.

The City after Property was born from aspirations to engage in thinking and dialogue across siloed worlds. I came to urban studies through the back door of agrarian studies. My work on food justice organizing in the early 2000s led me to a master's degree in urban planning and then a doctorate in geography. I became steeped in theories of land reform in Latin America and post-socialist property relations in Europe. I found myself turning to them as I tried to make sense of land and property transformations in Detroit, a place that defied neat delineations between the urban and rural. While scholarship on post industrialism abounded and research on shrinking cities was ascendant, the land struggles that I was witnessing on the ground in Detroit often exceeded the temporalities and political-economic orientations of both. As I worked with Linda Campbell and Andrew Newman to develop the Uniting Detroiters Project, our conversations with longtime Detroit residents and activists deepened my understanding of how the contemporary urban conjuncture was not only shaped by long histories of fiscal disinvestment and industrial decline, but equally long traditions of movement culture—labor rights, Black liberation, immigration justice. These dialogues led to the film documentary A People's Story of Detroit (Campbell et al. 2015) and the edited volume A People's Atlas of Detroit (Campbell et al. 2020), whose fifty-plus contributors offer critiques of status quo urban governance while elucidating radical visions for change. The City after Property extends the collective thinking that came out of these projects, centering its analysis on land and property questions that pervaded Detroit's urban planning and development landscape during the early 2010s.

As I note in the book, I first became interested in Detroit because I—perhaps naively—thought the city would offer models for progressive land policy. When such policies failed to transpire, I wanted to understand why. I also wanted to understand the gulf between expert understandings of the city's land crisis and those of longtime Detroiters. The city's abandonment was often cast as a past action. Yet, as I tried to make sense of struggles over the city's future, I began to see how abandonment was enacted in both the past and the present through the making, unmaking, and remaking of property relations. Hamlin and I share an interest in such questions. Her scholarship on late-twentieth-century public housing in Chicago directs needed attention to how policing serves to uphold social orders and secure property on behalf of the state. Policing, as she argues, also plays a key role in the constitutive relationship between property and abandonment (Hamlin 2023, 2024).

Likewise, De Franco and I share a set of common concerns. De Franco (2022) wrote a book called Abandonment as Social Fact, which, like The City after Property, is an effort to rethink abandonment in urban studies. Yet our approaches differ in foundational ways as she makes clear in her review, asserting that the focus of research or policy ought to be on properties where there are problems (i.e., the vacant lot or blighted building), not property itself. Critiquing my approach, she writes, “having problems with properties does not necessarily demand thinking of a city after property.”

There are limits to short reviews and rejoinders. If De Franco were here, I’d invite further conversation: Why not think about both? Why leave liberal property unquestioned? Why leave aside its raced, classed, and gendered histories? What do we lose when researchers and policymakers discount the ways people—particularly those who have been dispossessed of property—seek to imagine social and spatial orders beyond possessive individualism and dominion? These are the questions at the heart of The City after Property.

The book is mostly a recent history of property-making in Detroit but as suggested above, one argument I make is that to understand contemporary land struggles, our analyses must go deeper than twentieth-century postindustrial decline. Throughout the work, I seek to show how settler colonialism and racial capitalism articulate over the longue durée. That said, The City after Property is not a history of colonial property relations. Whiteside thus rightly suggests that to see what comes after capitalist property, we need to ask what came before. For Whiteside, the before is the early colonial town. Whiteside's research on proprietary settler colonialism (Whiteside 2023) offers important insights into how different forms of state, law, and property sought to bring order to the liminal and contested states of landownership on the frontier of the company colony. Here the company would manage overseas trade as indentured white settlers secured and exploited the land. Whiteside urges urban researchers to attend to how public land giveaways have secured past and present fiefdoms. What do we need, she asks, to vanquish such visions?

One answer is that we need social movements powerful enough to stop public giveaways for speculative development. Indeed, in recent years, we’ve seen a resurgence in land and housing justice movements not seen since the 1960s. Another answer to vanquishing such visions is learning from those who have long sought to do so. Here, historical studies like those by Whiteside are promising because they have the capacity not only to illuminate the early property formations of the company town but also the alternative ontologies of property and personhood that preceded the advent of liberal property and those that persist in its shadows. As I argue in The City after Property and as Whiteside also shows in her work, property requires constant doing (Rose 1994). There is thus nothing natural or given about the “racial regimes of ownership” (Bhandar 2018). They are made and remade over generations. If such regimes are entrenched and serve the powerful, it is also true that they can fall apart. When this happens, society faces choices about how to reassemble or reorder them: late-capitalist fiefdoms or “otherways,” as Quizar puts it?

The editors of Dialogues hope that their model of commentaries and rejoinders will help break “epistemic bubbles” (Moore 2023, 203). One way to break epistemic bubbles is to bring people into a conversation who have been left out. Another approach is to learn from those who are having different conversations. Such epistemological risk taking does not necessarily ensure rupture, but it may yet rearrange the possibility of knowledge. That is, it might create new conditions for what is known and can be known as urban research.

As this implies, I am using “epistemic risk” in a radically different way than De Franco does in her review. She charges The City after Property with falling prey to epistemic risk, by which she means mistaken logic and false conclusions. For De Franco, the book's treatment of racial history risks fanning the flames of racial hysteria. De Franco characterizes references to the well-founded relationship between Black debt and white wealth as hyperbolic. Invoking conservative geographer Joel Kotkin's neo-feudal thesis, she minimizes the ways banks profiteered from subprime borrowers’ inability to pay their mortgages by portraying them as merely misguided policies not lucrative lending strategies. It seems that for De Franco, like conservative economist Thomas Sowell (who has vociferously condemned affirmative action and whose work she draws on), property is sacrosanct; it is from property rights that economic prosperity supposedly follows and freedom prevails. Such critiques bring into stark relief the current epistemic challenges of urban research as well as the societal challenges of redress and repair. How do we speak across bubbles?

Yes, as De Franco notes, and as I do too in the book, the global recession of 2008 impacted all types of families, but we ought not willfully ignore its disproportionate impact on Black and Brown families. Detroit exemplifies these dynamics. It also exemplifies how the usurpation of democracy in the wake of the crisis followed racial lines. How ought urban researchers think about such fiscal and moral debts?

As Quizar writes in her review, “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 systemic racist looting of its wealth?” There is an imperative for urban researchers and practitioners to grapple with such questions. Yes, community benefits ordinances, as De Franco suggests, are one redistributive intervention, but as the Detroit People's Platform activists have argued, the one adopted in Detroit does little to benefit the average resident (Detroit People's Platform 2022). When did visions for the future become so anemic or, as Mancini puts it, so narrowly confined to individual ownership and market-driven interests?

As a metaphor, the epistemic bubble suggests a certain whimsy or lack of permanence. Yet epistemic orders matter precisely because they materialize as social and spatial orders. As longtime Detroit-based social activist and philosopher Grace Lee Boggs explained in an encounter summarized in the book, abstractions give rise to material worlds. For these reasons, repair is multifaceted. Repair involves more than just a focus on “bricks and mortar,” as Mancini notes in her review, it requires attending to “deeper wounds within society.”

Here Detroit is instructive. In the wake of the subprime crisis, the city became a key site for capital experimentation. If Detroit is often cast as exceptional, as Quizar points out, capital's boom and bust cycles do not make it so. One thing that does make the city exceptional, however, as she notes and as I try to show in the book, are the forms of innovative organizing that Detroiters have birthed across centuries and the logics of care that undergird them (cf. Quizar 2022). From those who shuttled and harbored runaway slaves on the Midnight stop of the Underground Railroad to the anticolonial solidarity and labor movements of the 1960s to the radical experiments of today, Detroiters have long provided examples of what it means to try to break from racial capitalist logics that have allowed the ownership of both people and land and imagine freedom otherwise.

Such past and present experiments are not infallible, as Quizar writes. Nor should they be romanticized. Yet if urban researchers ignore or dismiss them, we do so at our own peril. The City after Property, thus, extends an invitation to urban scholars and practitioners to think with Detroiters and join them in fostering dialogue about democratic reconstruction and the possibilities of more just urban futures—after property.