Another exciting forthcoming title recently indexed by Southwest Humanities, Sara Safransky’s The City after Property: Abandonment and Repair in Postindustrial Detroit (Duke University Press), is scheduled to be published in August 2023. In this study of the ways that postindustrial decline in Detroit has engendered new approaches to the politics of land in urban areas, “Safransky presents a new way of conceptualizing urban abandonment. . . challeng[ing] popular myths that cast Detroit as empty and narratives that reduce its historical decline to capital and white flight.” Using a framework of theoretical approaches to critical geography and grassroots ethnography, The City after Property “shows how private property functions as a racialized construct, an ideology, and moral force that shapes selves and worlds” and thus opens up a path toward alternative considerations of urban life. For more information about this title, please see the publisher’s website here.
SOUTHWEST HUMANITIES 