Rethinking Land Struggle in the Postindustrial City Sara Safransky Department of Human and Organizational Development, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA; sara.e.safransky@vanderbilt.edu Abstract: The racial and cultural politics of land and property are central to urban struggle, but have received relatively little attention in geography. This paper analyzes land struggles in Detroit where over 100,000 parcels of land are classified as “vacant”. Since 2010, planners and government officials have been developing controversial plans to ruralize Detroit’s “vacant” neighborhoods as part of a program of fiscal austerity, reigniting old questions of racialized dispossession, sovereignty, and struggles for libera- tion. This paper analyzes these contentious politics by examining disputes over a white businessman’s proposal to build the world’s largest urban forest in the center of a Black majority city. I focus on how residents, urban farmers, and community activists resisted the project by making counterclaims to vacant land as an urban commons. They argued that the land is inhabited not empty and that it belonged to those who labored upon and suffered for it. Combining community-based ethnography with insights from critical property theory, critical race studies, and postcolonial theory, I argue that land struggles in Detroit are more than distributional conflicts over resources. They are inextricable from debates over notions of race, property, and citizenship that undergird modern liberal de- mocracies and ongoing struggles for decolonization. Keywords: land struggles, race, property, informality, urban greening, commons, decolonization, Detroit For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity. (Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961) Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality. (Malcolm X, “Message to the Grassroots”, 1963) We got to get together and buy some land Raise our food just like the man Save our money, do like the mob Put up your fight, and own the job. (James Brown, “Funky President”, 1974) Introduction “Hantz off our land!” The woman stood with a microphone addressing approxi- mately 300 people who had gathered in the gymnasium of Timbuktu Academy for a rally against financier John Hantz’s proposal to construct the world’s largest urban forest in the center of the city. The crowd erupted with enthusiastic cheers. Antipode Vol. 00 No. 0 2016 ISSN 0066-4812, pp 1–22 doi: 10.1111/anti.12225 © 2016 The Author. Antipode © 2016 Antipode Foundation Ltd.