Description
Book SynopsisSara 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.
Trade Review“By asking ‘What comes after property?’ Sara Safransky opens up a captivating and incisive mix of political economy and urban geography to think with and against dominant discourses on Detroit’s decline. The result is a refreshing take on the entanglements of property, race, and urban politics that adeptly weaves ethnographic and archival research with political theory and global struggles for freedom into a rich analysis that makes
The City after Property essential reading for scholars of racial capitalism and urban change.” -- Kate Derickson, Associate Professor of Geography, University of Minnesota
Table of ContentsAbbreviations 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
