Racial Capitalism and Claims to Space in Post-bankruptcy Detroit

My dissertation examines the roles of land use and property governance in mediating racial and economic inequality in the urban environment. This dissertation is concerned with how gendered and raced subjectivities shape property relations across the urban landscape in the United States. The articles that comprise this manuscript dissertation are based on an extended case method approach utilizing mixed qualitative methods in Detroit, Michigan between 2016 and 2018. These articles explore how the evolving governance of property following Detroits bankruptcy manifested in market formations and legal frameworks that disrupted long-practiced informal relationships to property by residents. Residents voluntary stewardship has revealed the generative capacities of the citys vast stock of vacant properties, the communitys ability to defend themselves against politics of austerity, and how city government has come to depend on residents unpaid labor in the absence of municipal maintenance capacities of fair taxation policies. Detroit is a propagative site for understanding contemporary manifestations of racialization and urban property relations due to the large stock of municipal land holdings, the temporary seizure of democratic representation during the 2013 instatement of emergency management, and this post-bankruptcy moment of imagining how all Detroiters will live together in the increasingly divided city. This is the context in which land justice and housing advocates, including urban farmers are reshaping Detroits narrative of material depravity. By exemplifying how municipal land holdings and foreclosed homes can be harnessed toward ends of racial justice through the redistribution of property back to those whose stewardship has added value to their neighborhoods, Detroiters are working toward a future their elected officials have not yet imagined. These articles address how urban property markets are mobilized toward ends that are increasingly fractured from liberal conceptualizations of the role of city governments. Once thought to hold moral obligations to improve the lives of residents through providing public services, equity in governance, and to advance the human condition via infrastructural development and democratically embedded public process; the volatility of this particular citys government has produced quite the opposite, constructing variegated rather than equitable tiers of citizenship and access to space.