DIY Detroit: Making Do in a City without Services by Kimberley Kinder (review)

Kimberley Kinder's book is a much-needed contribution to the literature on Detroit, specifically, and shrinking and declining cities more broadly. In a body of literature that too often ignores the day-to-day realities and lived experiences of urban decline, this book engages with Detroiters who are using their own time, money, expertise, and know-how to fill the voids in safety, municipal services, and development in a city that has failed to provide the basic necessities for urban life. The book chronicles in great detail different acts of self-provisioning as told through the lives and practices of people she has interviewed.

This self-provisioning is primarily done in what Kinder refers to as "gray spaces": the spaces that private landowners abandoned and public officials neglected. While Detroit's ruins and abandoned spaces are often sensationalized, Kinder ethnographic study meticulously documents residents' struggles to protect homes and neighborhoods while trying to achieve some degree of normality and stability in a city whose economic and demographic decline has been among the most extreme in the Western World.

The book focuses on six self-provisioning strategies that residents employ. They often act as informal realtors, using their own family and social networks to find suitable occupants for vacant houses on their streets. If they failed to find suitable occupants, residents would use practices of defensive architecture to protect vacant homes. These include "dressing" a home to make it appear occupied (these practices include mowing the lawn, adding window curtains and changing seasonal décor such as Christmas decorations), boarding up a home or removing steps to prevent people from entering, and in some extreme cases, setting fire to houses themselves. As Kinder notes throughout the book, many of these acts are illegal, some are dangerous, and residents grapple with their own ethics and morals.

Another practice is to repurpose vacant properties by turning them into art pieces, storage spaces, or even using the land for urban gardening. Moving beyond the realm of the built environment, the next practice involves domesticating public works, as when residents take on tasks such as clearing debris, cutting grass in parks, shoveling snow, and other practices that would normally fall under the remit of a municipality. She notes that simply leaving a porch light on overnight was an intentional and ubiquitous practice that helped provide light on streets where few or none of the municipal street lights functioned. Residents also acted as "eyes on the street," keeping watch and acting as informal security guards. In the final strategy, producing local knowledge, residents collected their own data about different conditions within the neighborhood, or worked towards producing new narratives that challenged some of the dominant perspectives about Detroit and their communities.

Kinder cautions us, throughout the book, not to romanticize these efforts; they exist because residents have no other choice and she stresses that these acts of self-provision are neither an equitable nor a long-term solution to Detroit's problems. She frequently reminds us that residents themselves would rather have a functioning real estate market and decent public services, rather than having to find tenants for abandoned houses or pick up dumped trash on their block.

Empirically, the book is very well researched and is based on seventy-three interviews with residents in four neighborhoods, as well as other key stakeholder interviews and participant observations. By documenting these strategies and the struggles to maintain a basic sense of normality, this book helps to "people" a body of literature on urban decline that often fails to engage with ordinary residents. By using the voices of Detroiters rather than writing about the city from a literal and figurative distance, Kinder brings to light the experiences, hopes, and struggles of residents in a city that is often written about, but rarely engaged with in the level of depth and detail presented in this book.

Kinder's work is centered less...