Promised Land: The Politics of Abandonment and the Struggle for a New Detroit

This dissertation examines contemporary land-use and planning conflicts in Detroit where, in 2014, city officials classified 150,000 lots as "vacant" or "abandoned." Bringing urban geography into conversation with critical race studies and property theory, the dissertation illuminates how private property, personhood, and racial difference have shaped and been shaped by postindustrial urban crisis. Based on 17 months of engaged research conducted between 2010 and 2012, I examine how different visions for Detroit's future are enacted through black radical farming projects, a for-profit urban forestry venture, emergency management and bankruptcy, a tax foreclosure auction, and a citywide planning process aimed at repurposing Detroit's highest vacancy (or least populated) neighborhoods as urban wilderness while withdrawing infrastructure and public services. The dissertation shows that despite the widespread discourse of vacancy, the neighborhoods targeted for "greening" were not empty, but home to more than 100,000 people. This contradiction points to the inequities of an ascendant urban planning ethos that integrates rationalities of environmental sustainability and fiscal austerity while ignoring histories of racialized uneven development. Even as the controversial abandonment and greening of certain neighborhoods proceeded, social movements articulated the right to a different future city by mobilizing around the concepts of the commons and community self-determination. In addition to engaging with twenty-first century urban planning issues, the dissertation challenges historical narratives of the decline of Detroit and other postindustrial cities. Detroit's fall is typically narrated in relation to the global political economy of manufacturing, white flight, and capital flight. While these processes are important for understanding the spatial and economic predicaments Detroit faces, they are limited in two key ways. First, they cast urban abandonment as a past action, rather than an active process. Second, they elide community-based efforts to undo regimes of racial violence. I argue that the struggle for a new Detroit reveals the "settler colonial present" as a broader urban condition in the United States. The creation of more just and sustainable urban futures demands that we grapple with how the racialized history of property relations undergirds urban crisis and shapes the spatial imaginaries of those struggling for self-determination.Doctor of Philosoph

Pork chop politics: constructing rural economies and imagining alternatives

In 1992 Smithfield Foods opened the biggest hog processing plant in the world in Bladen County, North Carolina. This paper attempts to make sense of this reconfiguration of landscapes and livelihoods by examining how Smithfield became a commonsensical approach to economic development and job creation in a low-income rural region. I also examine how this approach worked in conjuncture with changing agro-food regimes to promote the emergence of N.C. Choices-a network that supports small-scale hog producers through training and marketing and connects them with processors, retailers, and consumers. Building on economic historian Karl Polanyi's conceptions of embeddedness, I argue that whereas economic development vis-Ã-vis corporate hog production positions the economy as a dominant societal force, push backs like N.C. Choices work to re-embed the economy within society. My goal in exploring these dynamics is to place alternative agro-food debates within critical development studies and consider how the momentum of various movements-environmental, labor, and food justice-can be elaborated to rethink economic development strategies.Master of City and Regional Plannin

Repenser les luttes pour l’accès à la terre dans la ville postindustrielle

Les politiques raciales et culturelles concernant l’accès à la terre et la propriété sont au coeur des luttes urbaines, mais ont reçu relativement peu d’attention de la part des géographes. Cet article analyse les luttes pour l’accès à la terre qui ont cours à Détroit, où plus de 100 000 terrains sont classés comme « vacants ». Depuis 2010, les urbanistes et les autorités gouvernementales ont élaboré des plans controversés dans le but de ruraliser les quartiers « vacants » de Détroit dans le cadre d’un programme d’austérité fiscale, ranimant d’anciennes questions de dépossession liée à la race, de souveraineté et de luttes de libération. Cet article se penche sur ces politiques litigieuses à travers l’examen des conflits provoqués par la proposition d’un homme d’affaires blanc de construire la plus grande forêt urbaine du monde au centre d’une ville à majorité noire. Je me suis intéressée à la façon dont les résidents, les agriculteurs urbains et les activistes communautaires ont résisté au projet en revendiquant les terrains vacants en tant que communs urbains. Ils ont fait valoir que ces terres sont occupées et qu’elles appartiennent à ceux qui ont travaillé et souffert pour elles. En combinant l’ethnographie communautaire aux idées de la théorie critique de la propriété, des études critiques de la race et de la théorie postcoloniale, je soutiens que les luttes pour la terre à Détroit dépassent les conflits sur la redistribution des ressources. Elles sont indissociables des débats sur les notions de race, de propriété et de citoyenneté qui sous-tendent les démocraties libérales modernes et les luttes actuelles pour la décolonisation.The racial and cultural politics of land and property are central to urban struggle, but have received relatively little attention in geography. This paper analyzes land struggles in Detroit where over 100,000 parcels of land are classified as “vacant”. Since 2010, planners and government officials have been developing controversial plans to ruralize Detroit’s “vacant” neighborhoods as part of a program of fiscal austerity, reigniting old questions of racialized dispossession, sovereignty, and struggles for liberation. This paper analyzes these contentious politics by examining disputes over a White businessman’s proposal to build the world’s largest urban forest in the center of a Black majority city. I focus on how residents, urban farmers, and community activists resisted the project by making counterclaims to vacant land as an urban commons. They argued that the land is inhabited not empty and that it belonged to those who labored upon and suffered for it. Combining community-based ethnography with insights from critical property theory, critical race studies, and postcolonial theory, I argue that land struggles in Detroit are more than distributional conflicts over resources. They are inextricable from debates over notions of race, property, and citizenship that undergird modern liberal democracies and ongoing struggles for decolonization