Abolitionist Proptech
Type: Virtual Paper
Day: 2/27/2022
Start Time: 2:00 PM
End Time: 3:20 PM
Theme:
Sponsor Group(s):
Digital Geographies Specialty Group
, Urban Geography Specialty Group
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Organizer(s):
Ian Spangler
, Eric Robsky Huntley
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Chairs(s):
Ian Spangler, University of Kentucky
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Description:
Housing and home are at the core of the global political economy. While the mass abstraction of housing into financial instruments enrolls tenants and homeowners into vast circuits of capital (Allon 2010), the consolidation of real estate ownership by institutional landlords reinforces pre-existing regimes of racial capitalism and exclusion from property markets (Fields and Raymond 2021; Baker 2020). In addition to being the “key object of financialization” writ large (Aalbers 2017), housing is also commonly understood as being “in crisis.” Access is historically low, prices are historically high, and COVID-19 has intensified both of these dynamics with evictions quickly returning to pre-pandemic heights (Vilenica et al. 2020; Cowin, Martin, and Stevens 2020).
In recent years, scholars working at the intersection of critical housing studies and platform urbanism have identified digital property technologies, or “proptech,” as a powerful force in reshaping financial relations and social life with regards to housing and home (Fields and Rogers 2019). Generally, research suggests that proptech is greatly limited in its capacity for emancipatory politics due to the constraints placed upon proptech firms by financialized platform capitalism. This does not mean, however, that digital technologies leveraging platform logics and technical means to consolidate tenant power are always-already coopted: in fact, such technologies will likely prove important in social movements for the “de-financialization” of housing (Wijburg 2020). As critical data studies and critical GIS have rewritten (and rewritten): to engage is to strategically critique and leverage, situate and do (Shelton Forthcoming; Gieseking 2018; D’Ignazio and Klein 2020).
This session engages with a recent provocation from Desiree Fields and Elora Raymond that “studies of financialization need to account for dialectics of dispossession and resistance” (2021:29), and from McElroy, So, and Weber’s call for an “abolitionist approach to landlord tech” (2021, n.p.) Brian Jefferson calls for ‘viral abolition’ and resistance to carceral digital logics (2020; see also Benjamin 2019), while Ananya Roy, insisting that “property regimes are colonial regimes,” calls for an “abolitionist framework for housing justice” (2016). Building on these insights, this session aims to bring together scholars working at the intersection of property technologies (broadly understood), digital geographies, and housing justice/tenants’ rights to ask how scholars and activists can create, build, and organize towards abolitionist proptech.
Presentation(s), if applicable
Ian Spangler, ; Disrupting Disruption with Abolitionist Proptech |
Danielle Kerrigan, ; Employing prop-tech to contest landlord power in Montreal |
Wonyoung So, MIT; Tenant Screening in Public Housing and Housing Voucher Programs: Racialized Stratification of Marginalized Tenants |
Alexander Ferrer, ; Sousveilling the slumlords: Organizer tech and tenant struggle |
Non-Presenting Participants Agenda
Role | Participant |
Introduction | Ian Spangler |
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Abolitionist Proptech
Description
Virtual Paper
Contact the Primary Organizer
Ian Spangler - ian.spangler@uky.edu