Commoning the City

Empirical Perspectives on Urban Ecology, Economics and Ethics

Derya Özkan, Güldem Baykal Büyüksaraç, Derya Özkan, Güldem Baykal Büyüksaraç

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429664182
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

This collection seeks to expand the limits of current debates about urban commoning practices that imply a radical will to establish collaborative and solidarity networks based on anti-capitalist principles of economics, ecology and ethics.

The chapters in this volume draw on case studies in a diversity of urban contexts, ranging from Detroit, USA to Kyrenia, Cyprus – on urban gardening and land stewardship, collaborative housing experiments, alternative food networks, claims to urban leisure space, migrants' appropriation of urban space and workers' cooperatives/collectives. The analysis pursued by the eleven chapters opens new fields of research in front of us: the entanglements of racial capitalism with enclosures and of black geographies with the commons, the critical history of settler colonialism and indigenous commons, law as a force of enclosure and as a strategy of commoning, housing commons from the urban scale perspective, solidarity economies as labour commons, territoriality in the urban commons, the non-territoriality of mobile commons, the new materialist and post-humanist critique of the commons debate and feminist ethics of care.

Part 1

Commoning urban nature

Chapter 1

Racial capitalism and a tentative commons

Urban farming and claims to space in post-bankruptcy Detroit

Rachael Baker

Farming on Detroit’s vacant property parcels has been a strategy for blight reduction and food cultivation since the 1970s, first as a grassroots initiative, and then supported through a city program called Farm-a-Lot. As of 2018, Detroit is home to more than 2,000 urban gardens. Community-driven, non-profit, and newly arrived for-profit farms have been established throughout the city to put underutilized properties back into productive use, and to resource households and neighbourhoods with food and a source of income. The redistribution of property to city residents during moments of crisis has been a normal, albeit unusual reoccurrence throughout the city’s history. Instituted in 1968 following Detroit’s infamous race rebellion of 1967, city hall established the Farm-a-Lot program to redistribute properties that had become vacant as a result of fires and excessive damage resulting from police brutality and state aggression toward the increasingly African American urban population as White flight continued into the surrounding suburbs.

The tentative redistribution of city-held property in times of social and economic crisis is a model Detroit introduced to US municipal governments during the recession of the 1890s. Mayor Pingree’s Potato Patch program in Detroit inspired municipally coordinated recession and wartime food procurement initiatives in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Growers in the majority Black city today have largely emerged through impromptu gardening and unacknowledged adverse possession claims. Since the 2007–2008 financial crisis, they have become increasingly subject to austerity-motivated governance over the unprecedentedly large stock of publicly held land. The city’s post-bankruptcy approach to managing open space reflects a social relation to property reconfigured around the regulation of potential future land values, rather than harnessing socially reproductive surplus land management through tentative redistribution to residents, as has been normal in past moments of crisis. The recent re-marketization or “making of a market” out of public land reflects social relations of extracting value through race relations with the hope of producing market-based returns, revealing the workings of racial capitalism. Growers have invested time, money, and effort into removing waste from lots, mowing, growing fruits and vegetables, and maintaining property that was not being maintained, either by an absentee owner or by the city for periods of time ranging from months to decades. Growers have continued to face barriers to purchasing newly re-marketized property; either for lack of financial capability to match inflated sales values, or due to bureaucratic complications that make racialized class disparity in Detroit all the more apparent.

“New Detroit”

In the 2013 mayoral election, suburbanite incumbent candidate Mike Duggan, Detroit’s first White mayor since 1974, ran on a platform of creating “one Detroit for all of us”, in a city that was literally being divided under his leadership into neighbourhoods that would be salvaged for reinvestment and those that would be subject to extensive demolition. Actual pasture was proposed in areas of the city with active residents, dispossessing African American households for green land use typologies with no solutions for relocated displaced residents. During Duggan’s first term, the Planning and Development Department (PDD), once shuttered during the city’s bankruptcy in 2013, was reinstated and appointed a new director, Maurice Cox. Cox arrived in Detroit by way of building his name as a post-disaster redevelopment specialist at Tulane University in New Orleans. Behind the scenes, the yet-to-be utilized Detroit Land Bank Authority was looming as a pseudo governmental authority that Duggan’s administration was about to ignite: 11,000 residential and commercial building demolitions were completed in his first term as mayor. Early critiques of his mayoral leadership arose for being overly friendly with private developers like Dan Gilbert of online mortgage company Quicken Loans, and the Illitch family of Little Ceasar’s wealth. Duggan’s private public investment partnerships chronically underserve Detroit’s neighbourhoods beyond the 7.2 mile reinvestment zone encompassing the city’s downtown, Corktown and Cass Corridor, causing a swell of gentrification for the White residents, 35 years old and under, who comprise the city’s largest in-growth population. Detroiters beyond the “7.2” claim that the only attention their neighbourhoods garner from the city is through hired demolition crews and home water services being disconnected for underpayment of bills, sometimes for a balance as little as $150. Duggan promised city residents that the prosperity of the “7.2” would trickle outwards into surrounding neighbourhoods. However, ongoing population decline, water shut offs, tax foreclosures, and racial dispossession tell a different story: one of investment inequity and racialized redevelopment.

Since the 2013 bankruptcy and the arrival of Maurice Cox, the post-bankruptcy director of urban planning and development, farmers have faced a redevelopment agenda that shifts the city’s previous strategy of decreasing vacancy through voluntary stewardship of otherwise vacant properties to an ownership model. The widespread devaluation of property city-wide over the course of the last six decades positioned city planners to utilize strategies of accumulation – in Detroit’s case, land banking and the county tax foreclosure auction as revenue streams in an otherwise shrinking civic tax base. Property sales conducted by the land bank have prioritized bundled property sales, called “blight bundles” of high-volume sales of low-value “blighted” parcels. Additionally, Detroit’s post-bankruptcy property governance regime and 2015 amendments to the State of Michigan’s adverse possession laws¹ challenge farmers’ claims to property and revoke rights of adverse possession and informal agreements between residents and the city. While individual family homes are sold through the Detroit Land Bank Authority’s (DLBA) online auction program and the “Rehab and Ready” sales program, the DLBA has no formal program in place to sell individual parcels that are not adjacent to an occupied residential structure. This has made purchasing parcels used for agriculture exceptionally challenging for small-scale growers who established farming sites as satellites to an occupied residence or for those who rent rather than own a home. Recent property value assessments made by the DLBA have priced farmers out of potential future ownership of lots they have stewarded, despite sometimes decades of informal caretaking. These are the places where relationships to property are made visible in their highly socio-racial nature, and where austerity urbanism logics of dispossession and racial capitalism are challenged in their attempted reorganization of space.

Reproducing property disparity through the state

Since the state enforced emergency financial management following Detroit’s 2013 municipal bankruptcy, property governance and the management of the city’s open space have been reorganized through new institutional frameworks, a shift in political dialogue, and the remarketing of Detroit as “Michigan’s downtown playground”.² Not dissimilar from a pageant, non-profit and foundation-funded granting agencies have solicited pitches for neighbourhood “calls for proposals” to the PDD for revenue generating land uses and businesses. Invited to compete against one another in public speaking events and supposed “community engagement conversations”, proposed projects compete for inclusion in PDD’s economic development zone neighbourhood plans, giving non-profits and individuals the ability to purchase property in zones where the Planning Department has otherwise frozen land sales, including sales to current (often long-term) users of vacant land. As Harvey (2012, 80) argues, acts of enclosure of a potentially public resource in the process of capitalist urbanization “perpetually tends to destroy the city as a social, political and liveable commons”. Further, when development acts as a form of enclosure for the concentration of capital investments in the urban form, the fungibility of Black neighbourhoods gradually takes shape through disinvestment, dispossession, and displacement.

1 2015 amendments to adverse possession laws in Michigan increased the number of years that a squatter must maintain and occupy a property before gaining adverse rights of possession, from seven to 15 years.

2 In the State of Michigan’s 2015 tourism campaign, Michigan actor Tim Allen voiced a short commercial ad titled “Detroit Soul”. In the ad, Detroit is referred to as “Michigan’s downtown playground”, signaling that Detroit is a place to visit for entertainment and attractions.

In 2015, the mayor’s office directly facilitated the transfer of 40 acres of city owned land to a for-profit urban agriculture business in Detroit’s east Poletown neighbourhood. Recovery Park Farms had been in discussion with the city about securing property for farming for a number of years, though the sale of the 40 acres in east Poletown struck a harsh chord within the broader urban agriculture community. Recovery Park’s land acquisition was the second largest land deal the city had facilitated since the 2013 civic bankruptcy, the first being the sale of 180 acres of property just north of Indian Village neighbourhood on the Eastside. The bundles comprising 40 acres were sold to suburban Detroiter John Hants, an investment banker. Hantz’s business has since cleared housing and debris on just over 2,000 parcels and planted 25,000 hardwood trees using volunteer labour to create the country’s first urban hardwood tree farm. While both Recovery Park and Hantz Woodlands Farm are private ventures, Hantz Woodland is funded entirely by the Hantz estate, whereas Recovery Park has needed to seek out donors and investors for initial capital expenses while the farm expands to the point of creating its own revenue stream. Residents in these farms’ respective Eastside neighbourhoods have been sceptical of the businesses’ White leadership gaining swift clearance from the PDD to buy homes that would knowingly be demolished to create more square footage for potential for-profit farm land. In some cases, residents who remain in east Poletown or north of Indian Village homes’ are surrounded on three sides by Hantz or Recovery Park farm properties, as the city has allowed both businesses to transfer the properties’ primary uses from residential to agricultural.

Despite some indication that the city is willing to negotiate land deals for farming, national leaders in Black Urban Food Sovereignty located in Detroit have continued to struggle to secure access to farm sites that explicitly serve the needs of food-insecure homes and neighbourhoods. The Detroit Black Community Food Security Network’s (DBCFSN) D-Town Farm has access to seven acres of land in a Detroit park on a property lease with the city’s recreation department, despite a decades’ long sustained interest in purchasing the land. Feedom/Freedom Growers in the city’s Jefferson-Chalmers neighbourhood have been repeatedly told that the six residential parcels on which their farm grows are not available for purchase due to administrative complications, chiefly, that the city registrar office does not have copies of deeds for parcels in civic holding. While White for-profit farming businesses benefit from direct negotiations with city planners to purchase bundled property, Black-led farms that provide free access to training and sustenance are forced to maintain precarious relationships to farm land. Market returns through property sales to White business owners demonstrate how racial capitalism functions through assimilationist strategies that capitalize on the labour of Black people and communities of colour. In a 2017 interview with the director of DBCFSN, Malik Yakini described the recent land deals with both Recovery Park and Hantz Woodland farms as a mechanism for the continued holding of power over city property by White business proprietors and White-led proprietors and their organizations. Loud criticism from residents neighbouring both farms and from the urban agriculture community have expressed concern that both Hantz Woodlands and Recovery Park are property speculators. The city Planning Department and the DLBA refuse to sell individual and small numbers of nine properties or less to long-established farms. The mayor’s office and the DLBA, however, cooperates in selling thousands of properties to two large-scale for-profit farms, making visible strategies to racially segregate urban farming through privileging White-led organizations. More importantly, the White leadership of both of these farming businesses exhibits a preference for property accumulation by White deed holders, while smaller scale Black-led farms around the city continue to be turned away when they petition to purchase properties. Whereas the city is willing to enter into exceptional transfer agreements of property with large-scale farm operators, smaller scale Black-led farms are largely excluded from the benefits of property ownership. The distinct racialization produced in these exchanges gives reason for scepticism of a city administration claiming to build “one Detroit for all of us”. When capital necessitates that the falling rate of tax ...