Featured guests in this episode include Myrtle Thompson-Curtis, one of the co-founders and executive director of Feedom Freedom Growers, and Nate Mullen, an artist, educator and founder of People in Education.

Organized Abandonment and Nature as a "Cleansing" Force

In the second part of our episode on Safety and Interdependence, I told a story about the neighborhood-initiated park across the street from my house that was bulldozed by the city in October of 2024. The park had been forced off at least two other vacant lots before, and in both cases, according to them, it was because someone had bought the land they sat on and maintained in the owner's absence. All of the lots they once occupied now sat vacant again. Those fabled improvements never came. The park across from my home was constructed and cared for by neighbors, demolished by the city's Blight Removal Team in the name of the environment‚ and because it was a so-called mess‚ and is, at the time I'm writing this now listed for sale by the Detroit Land Bank.

I was initially encouraged by the fact that immediately after the city destroyed their space, my park neighbors were right back at it the next day. But two short weeks later, several police cars showed up to forcibly remove them all from their folding chairs and from the park for good. The next day, a for sale sign went up. The park's demolition and really the longer history of folks claiming and congregating in vacant space in the city and then repeatedly being forced off to other lots is symptomatic of a larger system of real estate speculation and an accompanying phenomenon called "organized abandonment," coined by Marxist geographer David Harvey. Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines organized abandonment as the effect of sustained disinvestment, leaving people without the capacity to, quote, "keep their individual selves, their households and their communities together with adequate income, clean water, reasonable air, reliable shelter and transportation and communication infrastructure." What's risen up in the crevices of this cracked foundation of security, she says, has been policing and prison.

This kind of abandonment and disinvestment leaves neighborhoods marked by the kinds of ruin porn and vacancy that Detroit has become known for, and it often precedes housing speculation, meaning many of these vacant homes and lots, for example, are owned by faraway commercial real estate investors who buy up packages of properties and let them sit unattended until it's profitable to do something with them. They let them rot. Either because they're not here or don't care, or because they think the profit from flipping them will outpace the blight tickets they'll receive in the interim. They become uninhabitable eyesores. Other property values around them might suffer. Trees grow through windows and front lawns turn into fields of wildflowers. And Sara Saransky's book, The City After Property, she writes about the many names Detroit has been given over the years and the various ways they've been used to construct it as terra nullius, a blank slate to be conquered or claimed‚ which we'll talk more about later‚ especially after the 1967 uprising.

At a time of guerrilla warfare in Vietnam, a journalist at the Los Angeles Times observed, Detroit has shown us how close we are to the jungle. The use of natural metaphors to explain urban change was not new since at least the late 1920s, commentators had used the lexicon of blight borrowed from plant science to explain the spread of urban decay. But the jungle comparison, long a motif in travel and colonial writing, did something different. It represented the city as a whole, not just parts of it, as a wild place, only fit for savages, providing justification for white and capital flight, as well as for discriminatory and punitive public policy.

This language and the lexicon of blight that Safransky refers to predates the park. It predates my life in Detroit, and it predates the rampant real estate speculation of the current neoliberal hellscape. That said, it still persists today. In the 2010s, journalists began writing about how, quote, "Detroit, for all its problems, or perhaps because of them, has become nothing less than a new American frontier. Once, easterners heeded the call to 'Go west, young man!' To leave behind the comforts of sophistication of all the established citadels in search of adventure and fortune, and to tame this great continent. Now that same whisper is starting to build around Detroit."

In the 1960s and 70s, jungle and battle imagery signaled the city's descent into darkness or Blackness. By contrast, the return of nature in the 2010s is its salvation. In American myth, the prairie conjures the pioneering spirit, nation-building and settler land rushes. Repurposed in the urban context, it recycles a settler colonial trope that has long pacified the violence of Indigenous genocide and land theft to make the resettlement of Black spaces seem heroic, like representations of ruins, rewilding narratives, deemphasize the ongoing struggles of hundreds of thousands of the city's human inhabitants, or in many cases, omitted them altogether.

Other discourse described Detroit's industrial ruin in the context of natural disasters like post-Katrina New Orleans or Pompei, places consumed rapidly by natural disaster, floods and volcanoes. Regardless of the century, this language has "political stakes," Safransky writes. She continues, noting that "geographer Nate Millington has drawn attention to how such representations become particularly problematic when resurgent nature is celebrated as cleansing a discourse with racial connotations." Put simply, they rendered a space predominantly inhabited by Black residents as empty, valueless and available for appropriation and new modes of capital accumulation. In a sense, in Detroit, nature has been pitted against people in a way that is ultimately detrimental to both.

Bumper

Welcome to Carceral Fictions and Abolitionist Realities, a series of audio essays about making room for abolition. "Making Room for Abolition" first appeared at Red Bull Arts in Detroit in October of 2021 as a month-long installation of speculative artifacts set in a home and a future without police and prisons. This series reflects on conversations from that space with Detroit-based organizers and futurists, people committed to food justice, water access, educational equity, restorative justice and Black liberation more broadly. When Black folks in Detroit manufacture better lives for ourselves, whether that's healthier food, safer neighborhoods, new technologies for moving through conflict, it's usually described as an act of survival or desperation, rather than being classified as an act of resistance or feature making or speculative design. But each and every one of them is practicing a future that especially poor Black Detroiters have been told is impossible. In each episode, we'll look closely at the kinds of fictions that shape our current attachments to policing, prisons and punishment to examine where they come from and how they affect us. At the same time, you'll hear us propose abolitionist realities that counter these fictions and open up other ways of being.

My name is Lauren Williams. I'm an artist and designer based in Detroit, Michigan, and I work with visual and interactive media to understand, critique and reimagine the ways social and economic systems distribute and exercise power.

About this Episode

This is part of a two part exploration of nature. When I refer to nature, I'm talking about it in a sense that would probably annoy scholars of the environment and climate change. But, I'm really just referring here to elements of nature that concern urban space in Detroit, which means in large part land, water and the wider dynamics of climate change. I'm also talking about our relationships to these elements of nature in the context of our focus on carceral abolition, namely: how we can witness carceral tactics at work in our approaches to living with nature today; how these carceral conditionings shape cities like Detroit; and how abolition might demand that we relate to nature differently. In this episode, we'll explore how nature shows up in Detroit, how our beliefs and practices around controlling land through ownership inform our relationships with nature in urban spaces, especially; how the land that became Detroit has been subject to colonial logics of frontiers throughout history; how powerful a fiction real property is and how these very same tactics are at work in Palestine.

Organized Abandonment and Nature as a "Cleansing" Force

In order to talk about nature and urban space, we have to talk about property. The history of property relations in Detroit is fraught, to say the least. Waves of dispossession have defined the experiences of Black landholding in Detroit. Black folks fleeing the South, a place where their ancestors had been property themselves, came to the Midwest seeking jobs amid the Great Migration. Black workers were, quote, "ghettoized within the auto industry and given the worst jobs," end quote. Their freedom to make a home and more importantly, to own homes in Michigan was kneecapped by redlining. Racist police brutality instigated the uprising of 1967, which had an indelible impact on the city's property landscape. The foreclosure crisis that hit the country worked over Detroit, too, in 2008 and 9. In the years leading up to the city's bankruptcy and fiscal conservatorship, the city began, quote, "ratcheting up tax foreclosures, privatizing and cutting back public service delivery, and aggressively recruiting private investment to the city's core, leading to the eviction of low income residents and an increasingly divided city," end quote. For context, Detroit was home to almost 2 million people in the 1950s. By 2012, the population had dropped to below 700,000‚ by more than half‚ and it had been hit hard by the foreclosure crisis a few years prior. At that point, the city labeled over 100,000 lots. A third of the city's area has either vacant or abandoned.

But let's be clear here. Vacant or abandoned doesn't always mean vacant or abandoned. These properties may have just been foreclosures, but many were still occupied.

From Safransky's book again, "In 2014 alone, the county issued tax foreclosure notices to an astounding 80,000 homes, approximately half of which were occupied," end quote. Beyond that, vacant or abandoned also doesn't necessarily mean empty or uncared for. There are many accounts of resident-led caretaking, sharing and stewardship that sprung up in the cracks exposed by the breakdown of the private property system. This could have been a moment to imagine otherwise. To explore creative strategies for commodifying property, to develop systems that reject extraction and accumulation, and to learn from what had already been going on amid Detroit's neighborhoods to collectively care for and steward the abundance of land left in the wake of so much flight. This could have been a chance to imagine what it might look like to construct a relationship to land outside of capitalist logics.

This is why the park situation bothers me so much. The city has had countless opportunities to rethink the ways we relate to land, to take notes from its residents. And time and again it rejects that and clings to both capital and carcerality, both of which have really, truly fucked it over in the past. The way the city demolished the park was violent. That space was covered with equipment: benches, tables, grills, basketball, hoops, a merry go round those tiny plastic cars kids can zoom around in, garden beds. And instead of moving it, even if it was going to be trashed, they took bulldozers and crushed everything while pushing it into a small mountain in the middle of the park before clawing it into dump trucks. They had two police units present just in case, and they were rude as hell to the folks standing by the folks who belonged to that park. When my park neighbors took over those lots, they made them productive, but in a social sense. And if you'll recall from our very first episode on Safety and Interdependence, there's a way in which the kind of activity that took place there constituted a form of being seen, not watched, of cultivating relationships, of maintaining a relationship to a space that many of these residents have been disconnected from by way of displacement, as Mia Birdsong told us:

Again, Black folks being driven away from land and family through to the prison industrial complex to Child Protective Services, there has been this American project of trying to make Black people unfree by separating us from each other.

They were producing a form of safety and practicing a form of freedom through their connections to one another and to the space they occupied. Clearing the park was about property and wealth in the way that neoliberal property is meaningless if not spinning on some kind of profit for its owners. But it was also about dignity. Sara Saransky, whose book I've quoted multiple times at this point is a writer, human geographer and professor at Vanderbilt who studies urban politics and race, especially in Detroit. In an earlier article about the spatial politics of dignity, she calls for attention to the ways dignity is either "restored or taken" in space. Citing a South African scholar, Bernadette Atuahene, "dignity taking is defined as what happens when a state directly or indirectly destroys property or confiscates various property rights for owners or occupiers, and the intentional or unintentional outcome is dehumanization or infantilization," end quote. Bulldozing the park with no notice, and so aggressively scoffing at my incredulous argument that the park-goers take care of the space, all of that constitutes acts of taking dignity.

I don't think we can own the land. I think it's a shared responsibility to care for.

That's the voice of Myrtle Thompson-Curtis, who I call Mama Myrtle, a co-founder along with her partner, Wayne Curtis, of Feedom Freedom Growers, a community garden in Detroit's Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood. Full disclosure, I'm a long-time volunteer at Feedom Freedom, and the folks who founded and run this space are a large part of what endeared me to the city of Detroit and led me to move here in 2019. I was drawn to what felt like a tangible expression of political action and daily life, of seeking sovereignty by growing your own food. And I felt at home with the quality of fellowship with Mama  Myrtle and the other volunteers every weekend.

To say we can't own land probably amounts to blasphemy in the Church of Neoliberalism, but let's hear her out:

I think about my interdependence and connectedness to the thing that keeps me alive and to other people. I've been touched by the injustice system. And so to think of a society, a place to dwell. A place to thrive. Where your every action may not land you in the back of a squad car or in this system means a great deal for the future of my family, your family, our families. And the least that I can do is to sound a warning bell, to educate, to understand that we can grow food that is not violent towards our very bodies, to utilize the resources that we had available, which were plots of land.

Here, Myrtle's talking about a very different orientation to land than contemporary ownership. More like stewardship than ownership, a mutual relationship that's less extractive and more about expressing and receiving mutual care.

It starts to undo some of the damage and violence that is perpetrated against us being forced to say you have to own the land to grow on it. I say, "No, you don't!" And I practice that revolutionary love and I advocate for others to do the same.

If we can't own the land, where does that leave our precious beliefs that enable us to profit from the sale of land and homes? It's worth noting here that Myrtle sees her relationship to land as a means of repairing the harm of, quote, "violence that is perpetrated against us:" the disinvestment by the city, the inaccessibility of healthy food, the separation historically of Black folks from their land, among other violences. What could it mean to conceive of land in this way as a relation through which we repair ourselves instead of as an asset through which capitalists enrich themselves?

And Myrtle, I mean your point, which is something that I think that the beauty of like black space in Detroit is that like in our bodies, we know this, right? Like you said it from the jump land can't be bought. If it can't be bought, it also means it cannot be controlled. And I think that like in a, in America that is a wild thought. Of course you can! Of course you can, right!?

In Jefferson Chalmers, where Feedom Freedom is located, we see abandoned, boarded up homes and public schools and overgrown lots throughout the neighborhood. We contend with the jagged, overgrown sidewalks lining the streets, pitted with gaping potholes and standing water after major floods in the summer of 2021, families across Detroit, but especially in Jefferson Chalmers, encountered basements transformed into toxic sewage filled swimming pools. There were these bright orange, failed Tiger Dams installed by the Army Corps of Engineers‚ water-filled tubes that were supposed to stop water from flowing through the canals into the neighborhood. But those were swept across the lots adjacent to the Feedom Freedom garden, like giant, hideous, deflated inner tubes that definitely didn't do their jobs. These visible markers of disinvestment are evidence of multiple compounding, orchestrated crises, including an action by the state to address long known infrastructural and environmental problems facing this area of the city. We'll talk more about these floods in our next episode. But for now, here's what Nate and Myrtle have to say about disinvestment and organized abandonment on the East Side:

It's not a place for care for you. It's not a place for care. Like, there's...

I remember being able to walk to school. Yeah, my primary school, my elementary school, my junior high school and then my high school and all out of all those buildings, I can walk through that neighborhood and it's like, my goodness, it looks so devastated. And the only thing to come and spur some investment in that area is a factory that's producing fumes that are causing asthma and hurting people, harming people.

And I mean, think about it. So my daughter's five years old, and if we think about like, let's say if we lived, we don't‚  but let's say we lived around the corner from my middle school, then for all of her life and actually my middle school has been closed for at this point, it's 2021, probably closed for close to, let's say, 15 years, right? So every person in the city of Detroit under the age of 15, that is the world that they have always known. And there's also something very real about the city that‚  and this is this goes into it, and this is why, like, abolition is all over into everything, right? Like‚ our young people also are not free and safe to move freely throughout the city. So most of them only see what's immediately around them. So if you live in a world where everything around you is disinvested in, where, like people don't provide you with fresh, healthy options for food, water, air, then there is a moment, right? There's a little bit of a moment where in which like you start to internalize that, that you think that that is what you deserve and that is what the world is.

Living in this state of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore refers to as devolution is like taking resources from institutions, programs, streets, households and lives and throwing it all into permanent crisis. In the words of a resident interviewed by Rea Zaimi for their article on organized abandonment and real estate speculation in Chicago, "living amid organized abandonment feels like you're being punished, almost like the city is punishing poor people for being poor." This kind of abandonment, whether it's in the North End or Jefferson Chalmers or Chicago, is often what makes way for neighborhoods to be cleared, for folks with more capital to come in and render them profitable.

Detroit: A Frontierland 

In a perverse way, real estate speculation in Detroit today has been further enabled by a tendency to frame the city as a new frontier, an urban wilderness to be tamed terra nullius akin to the westward expansion of the settlers in the age of Manifest Destiny that conquered nature as it cleared that land of its Indigenous inhabitants.

This is made possible in part by organized abandonment itself. Since I moved to Detroit five years ago, one of the common refrains I've encountered when I tell non-Detroiters that I live here, if it's not some version of the city's coming back, it's a sense that the city is some kind of blank canvas a terra nullius, a land belonging to no one, and open to claim by anyone. "Capitalizing on organized abandonment, many have redefined this majority-Black city as an urban wilderness waiting for gentrification," to quote Andrew Newman, a professor of cultural anthropology at Wayne State who studies the processes by which neighborhood residents act collectively to reshape the social, political and physical terrain of their cities. In A People's Atlas of Detroit, he and other authors add that, quote, "The trend to portray Detroit as an urban wilderness, its lands empty and open for the taking is a myth steeped in Indigenous erasure and anti-Blackness," end quote. Much of the discourse on gentrification focuses on Detroit's urban core. But outlying neighborhoods like Jefferson Chalmers may better demonstrate the way displacement of residents and dispossession of their homes, not growth, is a means of profit accumulation on its own. By draining the capital held in homes by predominantly Black homeowners.

Blighted wilderness observed in neighborhoods like Jefferson Chalmers, a product of organized abandonment, came to be presented as a problem to be solved by design, as well, a technical problem of ordering wilderness and identifying easy targets. Mapping apps developed by Loveland Technologies, like the Motor City Mapping Project and its predecessor, Why Don't We Own This? have done the work of presenting land and homes as easy to access consumables. In doing so, they further enable modern day settler colonialism or pioneerism in this so-called blighted wilderness. Loveland's founder, a guy named Jerry Paffendorf, came to Detroit after becoming disillusioned by Silicon Valley's startup scene and dreaming up a plan to play with the city's extremely affordable real estate, like a video game. The very first Loveland project began in 2010 when they purchased a $500 lot on the East Side and started selling 10,000 1-inch square lots for a dollar apiece. They called it inchvesting or micro-real estate, which Paffendorf mused might be better described as an improv art project, and based its design on virtual gameplay, inviting its micro-investors to make up stories about what would happen on their one square inch of property.

Detroit, for me, it was kind of one of those places that initially it was kind of like [inaudible], I was like, I don't understand anything that's, what's going on in that city. I only know kind of like ambiently messed up things about it. You know, I was very interested, I was reading these articles about like crazily priced properties, right? This kind of concept that was like, "Well, what are you talking about? Like, you know, a hundred dollar house, fifty dollar house, your house, one dollar house, free house, house where we'll pay you to take the house." And I was kind of acquainted with this idea of virtual real estate, you know, in Second Life the primary means of how the company makes money and how you be creative with it is you kind of buy virtual property, and then you build whatever you want on top of it. And there was something about being in the Valley and what was going on at the time‚ this is going back like 2008, 2009‚ virtual goods were big things and Xanga was a much bigger deal as like a company. And so this idea of like incredibly cheap property in Detroit and then kind of micropayments for virtual real estate where in lots of cases I'd see virtual real estate that was selling for more money than real properties in real cities. My brain didn't know how to make sense of it all, I was very naive. I fancy myself a very naive person and sometimes you keep hitting your head against the wall long enough, that can actually be an advantage on things. But anyways, trave‚  travel to Detroit with this kind of ambient concept in my head that I wanted to do something to put real property onto the internet in a new way and not knowing anything about the city, my initial lens for it was to try and like marry a micropayment with a real property, and the concept was to take a micropayment and literally a micro piece of property. So we had this kind of ridiculous novelty property fantasy, not real ownership system where you could inchvest in a square inch of land in Detroit. You essentially, if you put a dollar into the computer, you would get a square inch parcel that corresponded to a real parcel in Detroit and you could log onto the inch-tranet, we called it, so you could see to the other investors which parcels they had around you, and you could either make up what was going to happen to the property by telling story about it online or if you were adventurous, you'd come in and actually visit the property in Detroit.

Paffendorf says he was inspired to create and model inchvesting on Second Life, a virtual reality game wherein the majority of the company's profits are made from selling property in a virtual world. He remarks that property prices in Second Life were sometimes higher than the abysmally low property values in Detroit for actual homes and land. But Detroit isn't a virtual world. Real land, real homes and real people were implicated in this seemingly playful experiment in real estate speculation.

In 2011, Loveland launched Why Don't We Own this website that mapped all the properties available on the Wayne County Tax Foreclosure Auction, built atop Loveland's proprietary software called Site Control, which allows them to enter data and produce comprehensive maps showing information about property owners and the tax status of properties on the auction. Why Don't We Own This? eventually scaled up to become Motor City Mapping in 2013, when Loveland secured $1.5 million in public and private philanthropic funding to visually survey and catalog every property in the city. Mama Myrtle remembers this surveying well, recalling that those around her who participated optimistically anticipated that the project would improve the quality of the neighborhood, but she regarded it with skepticism, pretty sure the neighborhood's need for deep infrastructural repairs was still going to go ignored. It's not lost on me as I examine the dialectic between so-called fictions and reality that this vision for Loveland was modeled on a virtual world.

Real property, the real fiction

The real estate market is a strange web of fictions, if I ever saw one to start with. Land in the U.S. was stolen by force from its earlier inhabitants based on a myth that God herself had destined to be theirs. It was then given away or sold for arbitrary amounts of money to white men. Eventually, land ownership was made a prerequisite for citizenship and voting rights. White men who owned property came to make foundational decisions about American policy and economy for hundreds of years, long before anyone other than white men were even allowed to participate. And that doesn't even get into the financialization of the housing market that ramped up in the 1970s with the introduction of, you guessed it, neoliberal deregulation. This entire foundation rests on myths of Manifest Destiny that drove westward expansion; delusions about gender and humanity that imagined women as less than men; racial categories around Blackness and Indigeneity. They were constructed and iterated upon in the early American colonies, largely to control who could and couldn't own property. When financialization entered the picture in the 1970s, the fictions really kicked into high gear. When I say financialization, I'm referring to a major transformation of the economy that made it such that financial actors, financial institutions and financial logics gained increasing influence over the economy. In the words of Noam Chomsky:

The economy changed dramatically, in the last 35 years. There's been a major process of, conscious process of, financialization of the economy and the kind of exporting of productive industry. That's very conscious. And this not particularly obscure. Why? By about that time it was possible to make more profit in the shenanigans of money manipulation than in doing anything productive. And in market societies, people with capital go for what's profitable. One correlary to that was that the political pressure just to dismantle the regulatory apparatus with the support of economists in working with economic theories that‚ I mean it's astonishing that they're not ashamed of themselves, but anyway, that's what happened‚ one consequence of this one aspect of it is that for roughly 30 years, a little over that for the majority of the population, wages have real wages have pretty close to stagnated, a little growth, but not much. That's most of the population families get by with to a husband or wife working. We have very limited support systems as compared with other countries. So that means families are in trouble and that shows up in all kinds of ways. People, you can keep your income up by asset inflation, you know, just‚  and by debt. The asset inflation, of course, can't last. So you have repeated bubbles collapsing, the last one was an $8 trillion housing bubble, which amazingly, almost no economists could see.

Put simply, today, money is increasingly made through speculative financial investment rather than by making things.

Shelterforce, a nonprofit news organization that publishes journalism about housing, justice and community development, has written about what precipitated financialization extensively. With the rise of neoliberalism in the 70s, policymakers relaxed controls that used to regulate finance and separate commercial banking from investment banking, which is by definition, more risk prone. At that point, we saw riskier home loans like subprime loans rise dramatically; financial innovations led to novel types of tradable securities predicated on connections between real estate and financial markets; new types of investment vehicles were developed based on delinquent and other types of high risk loans; and tax policy shifted to encourage capital investment in real estate. This is where we've really turned up the gas, on the fictive nature of capital. Housing, the tangible thing, the wood and the bricks and the mortar and the pipes, plays a critical role here as collateral for debt, transforming it into an increasingly intangible asset. And the cultural and ideological imperative to treat housing as a commodity‚ a complex financial commodity, not a right‚ has opened up space for banks and hedge funds to start imagining these creative new derivative asset classes to take flight. But we shouldn't take it for granted that housing is a so-called commodity. This is another fiction we've rendered reality alongside the one that there isn't enough housing for all the people who need homes.

And at the end of the day, this matters because financialization of housing makes it harder to secure decent, affordable housing. It turns housing into a commodity, something people buy to make money, not to live in. It enables large corporate investors owning massive portfolios of housing to focus on extracting as much profit as possible from their properties instead of investing in them. So we see the quality of multifamily housing decline. It makes way for corporate investors to buy up properties and manipulate the scarcity of housing across the board. And it also makes way for the subprime mortgage crisis to dispossess millions of Americans of their homes. And finally, it makes way for us to criminalize homelessness. As we discussed in another episode of Safety and Interdependence. In short, this shit‚ the real estate market, which I take to refer to both the sale of land and the improvements upon it‚ is all made up. To be clear, my point here isn't that people shouldn't imagine new systems or that imagined systems are inherently bad. My point is: we shouldn't create the kinds of systems that require and produce such vast and intractable suffering across the board, and then pretend as if there's no way out, as if that system is a permanent fixture of our realities. Without acknowledging that we can and should dream up something else entirely.

Property Rights amid Neoliberalism: Colonial Hangovers

Where do our ideas about land ownership and property rights come from anyways? And why is it that today people stewardship, labor and care for land has no bearing on their claims to that land? Neoliberal theorist Ludwig von Mises argued that, quote, "private property is absolutely fundamental for the existence of liberalism," end quote. And today we tend to operate accordingly, as if private property ownership constitutes freedom itself. But neo liberalism, as you'll recall, is relatively new. It's only been around since the mid-twentieth century, and before that, distinctly American constructions of private property were shaped by John Locke's theories on private ownership. Perhaps most instrumental was the idea of terra nullius, again, a Latin phrase that means land belonging to no one. Terra meaning earth and nullius deriving from nwhullus or no one. This word has been operationalized to frame Indigenous land in the course of carving out the United States and elsewhere as empty, abandoned, uncared for and open for the taking. The only way for such land to become valuable, he'd argue, is by making it productive through "improvements." Locke believed that, quote, "land left wholly to nature that hath no improvement of pasturage, tilling or planting is waste." Edward Said, the Palestinian scholar and author of Orientalism, coined the concept of "imaginative geographies" to describe how colonial powers perceived their own self-proclaimed sovereignty over new territories. He writes:

It is perfectly possible to argue that some distinctive objects are made by the mind and that these objects, while appearing to exist objectively, have only a fictional reality. A group of people living on a few acres of land will set up boundaries between their land and its immediate surroundings and the territory beyond which they call the land of the barbarians. In other words, this universal practice of designating in one's mind a familiar space which is ours and an unfamiliar space which is theirs, is a way of making geographical distinctions that can be entirely arbitrary.

It doesn't matter, Said says, "if the barbarians acknowledge the distinction." For Said, imagined doesn't necessarily mean false or made up. I'm using the label of fiction throughout this series in a similar way. These fictions, like imagined geographies, are a matter of perception and enforcement that colonizers could perceive land as empty or uncared for was only significant insofar as they had the power to enforce that perception upon the places and people they encountered and enforce it, they did. To turn back to Locke  to look in order for land to be valuable, it has to be quote, "improved upon by labor." You have to do something to it. In and of itself, it's worthless, he says.

Okay, well, if we look in our collective memory as Indigenous people, there could never be such a thing as ownership. The burden of history shows that something like ownership is not even possible. The accumulated environmental knowledge and environmental governance knowledge Indigenous people have suggests that there's no way that you could take something as crude and simplified as contractual property ownership and somehow use that to create a sustainable arrangement between a human owner and whatever area of land is supposedly owned by them.

You're listening to Kyle Whyte, an environmental justice scholar and faculty at the University of Michigan. He's also an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. These concepts of ownership are incongruous with other Indigenous ideas about responsibility to land and its inhabitants, also known as kinship ties.

I think that the topic of, of land ownership is a major fiction within the United States. And when we get into the details as to why it is the type of fiction that it is, it seems like obvious in a lot of ways. How has like, the US government, private industry and others done everything they can to make something obvious, like not‚  not obvious, you know, I mean the, you know, the concept of like contractual land ownership it can't possibly work in any which way you try to understand it, you know, for example...

When Kyle says it can't possibly work, he's pointing out the fallacy of John Locke's theories of private ownership. The notion that land that seems empty and unused to white people is inherently up for grabs.

For example, there were, you know, previous Europeans and others that you had the idea that a certain type of like individual ownership and they actually thought this, that if you just people owned something in a certain way, then that would mean that they would use it in the best way. But, we know that that's completely false. And there's no way that just by somebody having a contractual ownership over a demarcated area of property, that they're going to do the best things with that area of land. In fact, history has shown us that that's like the opposite. It's actually literally not true. In fact, it's people that have that ownership that do some of the worst things to the land and have caused the climate crisis. You know, we also know that land refers to everything that's inhabited and migrating through and dwelling in and stopping by in that area, you know, most of which are not beings that have any cultural connection or anything like ownership whatsoever.

From the (Detroit) River to the (Mediterranean) Sea: Terra Nullius from Detroit to Gaza

To pick up where Kyle left off, much like Indigenous Americans, Palestinians' attachment to land emerges from a different place, not a place of productivity or profit seeking, but a place of relation. To many Palestinians, olive trees symbolize a profound cultural and historical Anchorage, the land rather than a means of improving it and increasing its productivity. While Palestinians see the trees in this way, Zionist settlers interpret them as evidence of an illegitimate and ultimately inferior form of land usage. Israeli and American settlers both characterized the geography they encountered as empty, vacant and offer this as a valid rationale for taking it. From the Detroit River to the Mediterranean Sea, terra nullius keeps rearing its ugly head. It feels like one of the most egregious and foundational fictions beneath this whole charade. It validated the original dispossession of Indigenous Americans' land, and it's been deployed over and over and over again as economies and states take on new formulations to validate new kinds of theft and extraction in the name of capitalist accumulation and wealth.

In Palestine, for the last hundred years or so, a similar logic to what enabled American settler colonialism has been deployed to dispossess Palestinians of their land and justify an apartheid occupation. Amid the ongoing genocide perpetrated by the state of Israel, real estate development has shown up in ways that extend the fictions levied to justify the destruction of Gaza since October 7th, 2023, the killing of over 40,000 Palestinians at the time I'm writing this in October 2024, and the deaths of over 100,000 more by some counts as a result of malnutrition, lack of medication, and unsanitary living conditions as a product of the nonstop assault.

Let's back up.

Locke's rationale about the improvement of land substantiating one's claims to it has been taken up by Zionist thought since Israel's founding in 1948 to justify reestablishing a, quote, "long lost connection with the ancient land of Israel," end quote. To return to Edward Said's imagined geographies, both Palestine and the territories which became the United States, were imagined as, quote, "unimproved, under-productive, wasted and vacant lands, thereby activating the settlers right to appropriate them," end quote. Zionist leaders have long emphasized the barren nature of Palestinian land as justification for establishing the state of Israel, expelling nearly a million Palestinians and gradually stealing more and more and more land in the Palestinian territories it occupies. Gaza and Detroit are very different places, but they're both places that are subject to forms of extraction and dispossession, animated and accelerated by colonial, carceral, and capitalist logics.

On the one hand, in Detroit, where we see organized abandonment at work, it's a speculative long game, the slow degradation and eventual clearing of homes and neighborhoods to make way for new investment. Gazans experience military bombardment so severe that it's produced as of April 2024; 37 million tons of debris, clouds of toxic dust, fumes and microparticles released into the atmosphere; the destruction of wastewater management and resulting daily release of about 130,000 cubic meters of raw sewage into the sea; toxic soil, air and groundwater caused by munitions; to say nothing of the death and displacement. If any part of this colonial endeavor were really about who can care best for land and environment, they're doing a pretty shit job. It's uncanny how much in the same way that Detroit has been painted as a vacant frontier land ready for the taking by wealthier newcomers, Israel unashamedly paints Gaza as a potential blank slate, a geography that could have been valuable if only the people there knew how to make it valuable. A place that could be valuable if only they could clear it of its inhabitants. A place that can be valued only in the ways capital knows how to value land. A wasteland.

Come visit beautiful Gaza. With its stunning beaches and charming boardwalks. You can stay in one of our five star hotels and get a taste of the best in Middle Eastern food. Embrace the vibrant nightlife of the city and experience a culture rich in tradition that. This is what Gaza could have been like without Hamas.

This Israeli ad paints Palestinians in Gaza much in the same way that Detroit's Black residents and Indigenous Americans before them have been painted as inept at managing their own land, sprinkled with accusations of terrorism, of course. The logics that enable this interpretation are shared by the American political machine, the real estate industry, and the wider neoliberal logics around property as represented here by Donald Trump's son in law, Jared Kushner:

And Gaza's waterfront property, it could be very valuable, too, if people would focus on kind of building up, you know, livelihoods. You think that all the money that's gone into this tunnel network and into all the munitions, if that would have gone into education or innovation, what could have been done? And so I think that it's a little bit of an unfortunate situation there. But I think from Israel's perspective, I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.

Embedded in Kushner's comment is the same gross colonial assumption that Palestinians are inept caretakers of their own land; that someone else, ostensibly Israelis or American real estate magnates, would be better equipped and therefore more worthy to do so. His comment about the sense that Gaza is essentially being wasted as homes for Palestinians can't be taken alone either. It must be understood in the context of the primary mechanism propelling the clearance of land in Palestine at this moment in time: a genocidal military campaign that has displaced nearly 90% of Gaza's population or 2 million people as of September 2024, according to the U.N. A campaign that's been couched as a defensive attack.

What I would do right now if I was Israel is I would try to say, number one, you want to get as many civilians out of out of Rafah as possible. I think that you want to try to clear that out. I know that with diplomacy, maybe you get them into Egypt. I know that that's been refused. But with the right diplomacy, I think it would be possible. But in addition to that, the thing that that I would try to do if I was Israel right now is I would just bulldoze something in the Negev. I would try to move people in there. I know that won't be the popular thing to do, but I think that that's a better option to do so that you can go in and finish the job.

In case you missed it, he's saying they should either ship all the Gazans to Egypt or bulldoze the Negev Desert, dump Palestinian refugees there, all so Israel can finish "the job," which, by the way, is removing Palestinians from Gaza, period. And it's not at all disconnected from us here in the U.S.. The Gazan genocide is an American and Israeli genocide. The Israeli state is funded by the American people, and the Israeli real estate machine is enabled by American industry, too.

This is the Marketplace Morning Report, I'm Nova Safo. Amidst an escalation of violence and protests in the West Bank, there is increasing scrutiny of money and resources flowing from the U.S. Jewish community that supports the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. According to settlement tracking group Peace Now, the Israeli government has seized more Palestinian land for settlements in the West Bank this year than at any time in the last three decades.

Back in March, a tense scene unfolded at Congregation Ketterer Torah, an Orthodox Jewish synagogue in Teaneck, New Jersey, a suburb of Manhattan. "One, two, three, four, occupation no more!" Outside the synagogue, behind police barricades, hundreds of pro-Palestinian activists were protesting what was happening inside an Israeli property fair. Visitors browsed glossy real estate displays, pitching houses and condos in Israeli cities like Tel Aviv and Haifa and occupied West Bank settlements like Efrat and Ma'aleh Adumim.

To spell this out again, this land grab is predicated on the fiction that the Gaza Strip would be better off in Israeli and American hands; that they must clear it of all Palestinians in order for that to transpire; that they should appropriate part of the desert to dump the Palestinians they've dispossessed of land and home. And once Gaza is cleared of its Palestinian inhabitants, they'll start building luxury high rises on the beach. And keep in mind, this proposition only moves from fiction to reality because of the unconscionable degree of violent military force exhibited over the last year. In December of 2023, an Israeli real estate development company known for building illegal settlements in the West Bank posted a fake ad on Twitter for beachfront real estate in Gaza. It features a loose architectural rendering of luxury homes superimposed on top of images of a Gaza neighborhood reduced to rubble by Israeli bombings. At the top of the image, the ad reads: "A house on the beach is not a dream." It's been debunked as a publicity stunt or a quote unquote joke. To me, it doesn't really matter if it's real or not for it to help articulate the ways in which settler colonial fictions ordain who deserves to occupy land and neoliberal capitalist fictions privilege housing as an investment vehicle rather than as a home. The vile substance of whatever humor a person might find in a joke so gruesome is real enough for me. The fictions it stands on like terra nullius or the mythologies that uphold the apartheid Israeli state, or the logics that enable the hundreds of illegal settlements already dispersing the West Bank, are real enough. The genocide is real enough. And it's no secret that the Zionist vision for Gaza is for it to become a part of the Israeli state at the expense of Palestinian life. In the words of Daniella Weiss, the so-called grandmother of Israel's settler movement:

Arabs will not stay in the Gaza Strip. Who will stay? Jews!

At this point, it's hard not to see this as a real estate grab disguised as a genocide disguised as self-defense.

Closing

The genocide in Gaza is an unconscionably violent form of clearing land for neoliberal profit making. A dignity taking, as we referred to it earlier. It's not comparable in the scale and pace of horror and demolition to what we see happening in Detroit. I would argue, though, that there fueled by similar logics and enabled by similar fictions.

When I was in grad school, I curated a small art show with some friends and one of the artists, a Mexican-American painter and illustrator named Danny Brown, showed a piece titled "Gentrification is Genocide." This wasn't abstract for him. He was commenting on the consequences of displacement and dispossession. What it costs you, in years of your life, to be uprooted economically or displaced without recourse. We got some backlash. People with ties to particularly violent, horrific genocides didn't like the idea of equating gentrification to widespread killing. But if we take the U.N. Genocide Convention's definition, genocide contains two parts, a mental and physical element. It involves acts committed "with intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group" to include "killing members of the group, causing serious bodily injury or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group." If we take this definition and look at how Black folks got here to the U.S., if we look at the long arc of incarceration and police brutality and the ways they extract and kill Black people, if we look at American eugenics experiments, if we look at failing infrastructure locally in Detroit, at lead poisoning and systemic dispossession of housing, at the dignity taking, at the ways Child Protective Services extracts Black kids from households, and the attendant psychic and physiological fallout of displacement and failing infrastructure and wealth extraction, it's certainly possible to interpret the way Detroit and the wider United States treats Black Americans as genocidal.

And I want to be very, very clear. This isn't the oppression Olympics and I'm not pointing this out to diminish the horror of the unabashedly violent killing of Palestinians or Rwandans or Armenians or Indigenous Americans or Cambodians or European Jews or... you get the point. But it's something I think of often because it's a provocation that makes us uncomfortable. And I think about the various ways violence embeds itself in our world and the ways it morphs into new forms as economies, societies and cultures shift. If only for that reason, it's worth sitting with that discomfort.

I have to admit, I keep getting stuck on this recurring contradiction as I write and record this essay: I'm pointing out to you the city's disinvestment that leads to an environment in which nature reclaims parts of the city. And I'm framing that as a problem. It's a reflection of their lack of care for their inhabitants. I'm then telling you that terra nullius isn't a valid argument for taking land that doesn't belong to us, whether by martial or economic force, whether on Turtle Island or in Palestine. I'm then telling you that I think my Park neighbors did in fact deserve to stay on that park land, in part because it had been left on cared for by the city or anyone else who had a so-called ownership stake in it. To reconcile this, part of what I'm parsing is the holes that keep emerging in the logics of capitalist real estate markets. The function of designating land terra nullius unclaimed wilderness for the taking is only ever invoked for the sake of profit and for no other reason not community benefit, not returning land to the commons, not social life, not a legacy of stewardship that proves a relationship with the land. None of that. Nature's reclamation of space in a city subject to organized abandonment such as Detroit, is evidence of a lack of care for each other, not some cleansing spirit of nature come to make the city and its inhabitants whole again. The notion of nature as a cleansing force in a majority Black city radiates racism. But it also conjures a definition of policing that we referred to back in our episodes on Safety and Interdependence. That is, according to Merriam-Webster "as a transitive verb, one definition of policing remains to make clean and put in order." But, when combined, both of these uses of the cleansing of the city, policing it in order to rewild it are deeply racialized and classed employing carceral logics, fictions and force to manipulate nature into a tool that disconnects people from land while simultaneously denying land any agency.

So, to return to where we started. What if we can't own land? Like Myrtle said. What if we belong to the land instead of owning it? And what if these systems and regimes we regard as unchangeable and naturally occurring aren't? What else might be possible? And what if the church of neoliberalism is actually a cult and we're all just one mortgage payment away from showing up in a documentary exposé about how we fell prey to our cultic leaders' enterprise? As Nate Mullen walked through the Making Room for Abolition living room installation in 2021, he picked up the third edition dictionary and brought it to the recording studio.

But I would I think that one of the things that your piece really brings to me, which is actually that I'd love us to bring, is that like, America also doesn't want us to know the truth of the place that we're actually in. And that's why like I brought, the Ojibwe dictionary.

You got the fake one, though!

Right! I got the fake one because it's the third edition.

It is.

Right?

Nate's point isn't about denying the fact that colonialism happened. It's about acknowledging that the only thing separating the colonial reality we've inherited today from the countless other possible realities we could be living is a violent, genocidal approach to claiming and defining land and people. It's about recognizing that it isn't somehow inherently true that this place is Detroit. It's a fiction that's been violently carved into the earth and into our ancestry. If this place can be a tree and that place across the water can be Windsor, why can't we just imagine them as something entirely new again? And more importantly, what would that actually require?

Next time, we'll explore what happens when nature itself snaps us out of this trance, reminding us of these fictions with a force we can't ignore. Before we close, here's a dispatch from an abolitionist reality:

Dispatch

In a far future, year unknown, in a home on the landscape where Detroit once sat, a side table is stacked with treasured books that never sit untouched long enough to gather dust. The home is situated in a Detroit that is no longer Detroit. A Detroit where the shoreline was swallowed by a great flood that reorganized our landscape in such a way that water is now more abundant and ever present than land. A third edition Ojibwe Dictionary lays next to a copy of Grandma's memoir about her life of organizing in Chiapas and Detroit, a tale that's as much about two places transformed by water as it is about Black and Indigenous solidarities. The third edition dictionary is spread open atop a first edition Ojibwe dictionary published over 100 years ago. The pages are used often, but cared for. Someone in the home is studying meticulously and they turn to this reference. Often it's unpopular to be unable to communicate in Anishinaabemowin these days.

Acknowledgments

Thanks for joining us for this episode of Carceral Fictions and Abolitionist Realities. Until next time, remember what's real: We can't actually own the land. Like borders, property rights are only real in our current paradigm if they're violently enforced. Land doesn't have to turn a profit to be valuable. The people who take land aren't inherently more qualified to care for it. In fact, the opposite is often true. Detroit and Waawiyaatanong were never empty to begin with, and there are countless other ways to relate to land besides the carceral colonial tactics of control, theft and extraction we've all been taught.

Thank you for listening and thank you to the many people who've made this show and the wider body of work possible over the last three years. Thank you to all the futurists featured in this episode who participated in this project three long years ago. In this episode that includes Myrtle Thompson-Curtis and Nate Mullen. And also thank you to Kyle White, who participated in an interview in the fall of 2024. And finally, thank you especially to P.G. for helping me facilitate these conversations. This limited series was dreamed up, written and produced by me, Lauren Williams. Essays were co-edited by my dear friend Ayinde Jean-Baptiste. And the audio was engineered by Conor Anderson. Excerpts from several references were read by voice actor Joy Vandervoort-Cobb. Our theme music is the instrumentals from a song called Detroit Summer by Invincible and Waajeed, courtesy of Emergence Media.

This project is presented in partnership with Respair Production & Media.