Sara Safransky, 2024–25

Sara Safransky is a human geographer, writer, and educator. Her research focuses on urban and regional development, race and the racialization of space, modern property regimes, the politics of memory, and climate reckoning. She is the author of The City After Property: Abandonment and Repair in Postindustrial Detroit (2023), coeditor of A People’s Atlas of Detroit (2020), and the coproducer of its sister documentary, A People’s Story of Detroit (2013). Her writing has appeared in Antipode, Annals of Association of American Geographers, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, among other venues. Safransky’s scholarship has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

While in residence at the National Humanities Center, Safransky will be working on a new project called Memories for the Future, an ethnographic and historical study of how the cultural politics of time and memory shape environmental struggles emerging in so-called climate havens. Safransky will be examining these dynamics in the southeastern United States, where climate change is giving rise to new forms of retreat, migration, speculation, and community planning.

Selected Publications

• Safransky, Sara. The City after Property: Abandonment and Repair in Postindustrial Detroit. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023.
• Safransky, Sara. “Grammars of Reckoning: Redressing Racial Regimes of Property.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30, no. 2 (2022): 292–305.
• Safransky, Sara. “Geographies of Algorithmic Violence: Redlining the Smart City.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 44, no. 2 (March 2020): 200–18.
• Campbell, Linda, Andrew Newman, Sara Safransky, and Tim Stallman, eds. A People’s Atlas of Detroit. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2020.
• Safransky, Sara. “Rethinking Land Struggle in the Postindustrial City.” Antipode 49, no. 4 (September 2017): 1079–100.