(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
In the wake of the financial crisis, geographer and urban planner Sara Safransky took over Detroit – a city that was already in disrepair before the financial crisis, because the large industry that had created the city was being wound up. After decades of deindustrialization, Detroit officials categorized more than 150.000 lots and properties as "abandoned" or "surplus." However, that was not quite how the remaining inhabitants perceived the matter. Safransky set out to investigate «what happens when a private property system falls apart and how people react in trying to patch it back together or rearrange it.»
A very readable book has come out of it. The City after Property. Abandonment and Repair in Postindustrial Detroit also reflects Safransky's own process of realization through the learnings she brought with her from her years of fieldwork—and activism—with the Detroiters who refused to be declared superfluous:
«I thought that Detroit could offer models for progressive property policy and a more socially and ecologically just form of urbanity. At the time I was thinking in terms of redistribution. It was only later that I began to understand the fundamental moral and ethical issues surrounding the urban lots and properties. Questions about race and individuals. About abandonment and belonging. About settling the estate and about healing.»
'Collective research'
The book is based on a wide range of source types: documents from the city's archives (both official and civil organisations), media coverage and secondary literature on Detroit and the city's development. In addition, interviews with e.g. Detroit civil servants and maintenance workers, with city planners, NGO staff, urban farmers, and residents active in local neighborhood groups, as well as observing more than 60 gatherings in various contexts – from town hall meetings to activist gatherings.
To document and analyze how Detroit residents responded.
All conducted as 'collective research' under a project called Uniting Detroiters: A group of activists, researchers, students and local residents with the aim of documenting and analyzing how Detroit residents responded to the redevelopment of their city.
A virtue of not coming down with a parachute and invoking the power of definition.
As an outside white academic in a city where the majority population is black from a different class background – both contemporary and historical – than herself, Safransky has made a virtue of not coming down with a parachute and invoking the power of definition. Instead, she settled down and took part in the daily activities of the inhabitants for several years. As she largely lets the common discussions that unfolded in those years
- and which she herself was part of – be the supporting narrative of the analysis.
Up for grabs
It is a story that moves between a crushing superiority and an indomitable ability to resist and imagine. Detroit's post-2010 budding of local initiatives for a community-oriented redesign of the urban infrastructure draws on an activist tradition that goes back as far as industrialization. One of the Detroit residents who was a central figure in everything from the labor movement to the civil rights struggle to local projects for a more peaceful, fairer and more sustainable urban life throughout much of the 20th century was even still alive – and in full force – when Safransky was doing his fieldwork: Grace Lee Boggs (photo), who at 97 published The Next American Revolution in 2012, and as we during Safranskys The City after Property comes along to study groups at
Throughout the book, we follow the residents' struggle to protect themselves against the investor vultures who quickly gathered like dark clouds over Detroit, and against the politicians who, in their fevered fantasies of a post-industrial future, laid the groundwork for the great grave robbery.
Many of these plots and properties were anything but abandoned.
The 150.000 so-called 'abandoned' plots and properties were up for grabs for outside investors, but impossible to gain ownership of for the local residents. This despite the fact that many of these plots and properties were anything but abandoned. For decades, the remaining residents had mowed grass, planted collective urban gardens, maintained buildings, and cleaned the streets in the areas where ownership was 'unsettled'. To avoid that their neighborhood – where many had lived for generations – were to fall into disrepair as more and more of the city's inhabitants, first and foremost the whites, left the city.
Primarily black population
Safransky documents in an almost reportage-like style how Detroit's primarily black population is robbed of their homes from 2010 onwards through foreclosures, how they are slowly suffocated through the closure of the public infrastructure – including vital water supply – and how the labor and love they have for years placed in the space of the city, is drummed over with as much indifference as only the combination of politician bureaucracy and investor capital can show. The contemporary drama is set in historical context, through which the maintenance of several hundred years of racial class society emerges in all its horror.
The City after Property unfortunately does not show exactly that – the city according to private property rights – since that city has not yet been allowed to unfold. But the book shows how an urban civil society can probably be trampled down, but that almost nothing can prevent it time and time again from shooting up like dandelions through the asphalt.
