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Philip M E Garboden, Review of “A Detroit Story: Urban Decline and the Rise of Property Informality”, Social Forces, Volume 100, Issue 2, December 2021, Page e18, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soab072
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Herbert’s A Detroit Story is an exceptional piece of urban ethnography. Based on years of participant observation and in-depth interviewing, Herbert develops a rich typology of property informality, exploring how the residents of Detroit scrap, squat, salvage, demolish, and farm their city’s many abandoned properties. The book divides the individuals engaged in such activities into three categories: (1) necessity appropriators who squat and salvage as a means of daily survival; (2) routine appropriators who engage in informal practices as a way of compensating for the public sector’s abdication of its responsibilities; and (3) lifestyle appropriators who leverage Detroit’s struggles as an opportunity to experiment in alternative “anti-consumerist” lifestyles. Herbert finds that necessity and routine appropriators are predominantly Black long-term residents, while lifestyle appropriators tend to be white and new to Detroit.
Herbert leverages this typology throughout the book, describing in detail not only the actions of each group but how they articulate and legitimize their behaviors. How, for example, do different Detroiters describe their moral right to demolish a building they do not own? For necessity appropriators, it is their own desperate need for the income from scrapping. For routine appropriators, it is simply the removal of a hazard that the city is too bankrupt or ambivalent to address. And for lifestyle appropriators, it is the symbolic reclamation of an inverted “wild” frontier. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these contrasts align with existing vectors of marginalization, with each group’s actions garnering a very different bundle of penalties and rewards. Necessity appropriators operate under the constant risk of sanction and displacement. Routine appropriators are tolerated insofar as they are doing the unpaid work of government, but only on condition of impermanence. And lifestyle appropriators are rewarded with an on-ramp to formal ownership and asset accumulation. These types of contrasts run throughout A Detroit Story and produce substantial insights not just about of property informality, but property itself.
