Property Rights in the Context of Urban Decline: Informality, Temporality, and Inequality.

[摘要] This dissertation studies a feature of social life that is of concern for sociologists, urbanists, and legal scholars: private property. In urban centers, real property mediates residents’ relationships to the space of the city and therefore also relations with each other. Private ownership is the dominant form of property regulation in the urban context, fueled in part by the pervasive narrative that the economic incentives of private ownership will ensure maximum care for property and thereby provide a social good. But the context of urban decline calls into question the dominant ideological underpinnings of private property, the generalizability of observed property outcomes, and purports to alter individuals’ relations to property and the way property mediates social life. Drawing on over four years of participant observation and sixty-five interviews, this dissertation analyzes property relations in the context of urban decline by studying the illegal appropriation of property in Detroit, Michigan via practices such as squatting, scrapping, gardening and demolition, and resident and authority responses to these practices. Detroit is regarded as the pinnacle of U.S. urban decline and is a particularly revealing case in which to examine property relations because of the scale and severity of its conditions. This dissertation finds that in a context that lacks reliable legal enforcement of property rights and a functioning market for property, non-legal or ;;everyday” factors rise in significance for constituting individual relationships to property and uncovers the informal property dynamics that shape urban life. The significance of these findings is twofold. First, these non-legal factors likely impact property relations in other settings and may help explain outcomes that are correlated with legal property ownership. Second, these findings are crucial for forecasting the impact of revitalization strategies in declining cities. Enforcing legal property regulation in spaces dominated by informal dynamics disproportionately impacts existing residents according to the everyday characteristics of their practices. This conflicting dynamic between formal and informal property relations is a mechanism for reproducing urban inequality unique to declining cities.

[发布机构] University of Michigan

[效力级别] urban decline

[关键词] property rights;urban decline;Detroit;squatting;urban agriculture;metal scrapping;Sociology;Social Sciences;Sociology