A Detroit Story : Urban Decline and the Rise of Property Informality

Bringing to the fore a wealth of original research, A Detroit Story examines how the informal reclamation of abandoned property has been shaping Detroit for decades. Claire Herbert lived in the city for almost five years to get a ground-view sense of how this process molds urban areas. She participated in community meetings and tax foreclosure protests, interviewed various groups, followed scrappers through abandoned buildings, and visited squatted houses and gardens. Herbert found that new residents with more privilege often have their back-to-the-earth practices formalized by local policies, whereas longtime, more disempowered residents, usually representing communities of color, have their practices labeled as illegal and illegitimate. She teases out how these divergent treatments reproduce long-standing inequalities in race, class, and property ownership. "Bringing to the fore a wealth of original research, A Detroit Story examines how the reclamation of abandoned property has been shaping the city for decades. Herbert lived in Detroit for almost five years to get a ground-view sense of how this process molds urban areas--participating in community meetings and tax foreclosure protests, interviewing various groups, following scrappers through abandoned buildings, and visiting squatted houses and gardens. Herbert found that there's a disjunction between different types of property reclaimers: lifestyle back-to-the-earth new residents, primarily more privileged, whose practices are often formalized by local policies, and longtime more disempowered residents, often representing communities of color, whose practices are marked as illegal and illegitimate. She teases out how the divergent treatment of these two approaches to informally claiming property reproduces long-standing inequalities in race, class, and property ownership. More generally, A Detroit Story examines how the attempt to formalize property informality in cities harms the most vulnerable"-- Provided by publisher Introduction -- Urban decline and informality -- Regulations and enforcement -- From illicit to informal -- Informality beyond politics or poverty -- Necessity appropriators -- Lifestyle appropriators -- Routine appropriators -- Surviving the city or settling the city? -- Regulating informality, reproducing inequality -- Conclusion : lessons for informality in the global North -- Appendix : research methods and data