This paper studies the arrival of digital nomads in Cluj, Romania. I focus upon double dispossession, in which ‘digital nomads’ allegorise technocapitalist fantasies by appropriating Roma identity on one hand, and in which Roma are evicted to make way for the arrival of Western digital nomads and tech firms on the other. While Roma are materially dispossessed as Cluj siliconises, they are doubly dispossessed by the conjuration of the deracinated digital nomad/Gypsy. As I suggest, this figure discursively drags with it onto-epistemological residues of 19th-century Orientalism – a literary genre that emerged within the heart of Western European empires. The recoding of the nomad today, I argue, indexes the imperiality of technocapitalism, or techno-imperialism. Double dispossession, as a phenomenon, illuminates that prior histories bolster, and are consumed by, globalising techno-imperialism. Postcolonial and postsocialist studies offer frameworks for understanding this update, as well as the accumulative and multifaceted dispossession that siliconisation inheres. I thus argue for a connected rather than comparative approach in understanding double dispossession, one focused upon connections across time, space and genre. A connected approach remains rooted in community organising and housing justice struggles.
This paper challenges dominant geographies of urban theory by conceptualising the dynamics of displacement in Oakland through place‐specific histories of racial/spatial politics. It argues that the repeated transposition of a San Francisco‐based model of “tech gentrification” results in deracinated dispossessions, or accounts of displacement uprooted from grounded histories of racial violence and resistance. It also argues that, while urban scholars acknowledge the role of historical difference in contouring dispossessions in metropolitan versus postcolonial cities, this consideration should be broadened to account for the racial/colonial dimensions of urbanism in the US as well. Treating Oakland as a “crossroads of theory”, this paper joins calls for a deeper engagement between postcolonial urban studies and critical race and ethnic studies from North America. Drawing upon the authors’ activist and empirical work, it contends that “thinking from Oakland” demands a foregrounding of racial capitalism, policing, and refusal.
At the height of San Francisco's hyper-gentrification in 2014, capitalist development groups began coopting anti-displacement grammar, thereby promulgating market-driven solutions for rising rents and eviction rates. Despite the historic roots of pro-development, this new form of San Francisco pro-growth activism emerged as a reaction to a renewed housing justice movement. It was during this time that over a dozen tenant's rights and nonprofit housing development organizations consolidated the Anti-Displacement Coalition, collectively framing the "housing crisis" as increased eviction and homelessness rates. Coalition members called for specific policies such as eviction moratoriums, taxation on real estate speculation, and enforcement of short-term vacation rentals to stop the displacement of long-term working class communities. Through direct action and strong anti-displacement policy advocacy, the Coalition united a renewed movement against gentrification. In reaction, pro-development groups that were amplified by the Bay Area Renters Federation (BARF) initiated a surge of what they called "YIMBYism" against housing justice groups' putative "NIMBYism" (Yes in My Backyard versus Not in My Backyard). While NIMBYism has long been understood as linked to racist and wealthy neighborhood preservation, in this article we assert that despite YIMBYism's framing of housing justice activists as NIMBY, both YIMBYism and NIMBYism shelter similar racist onto-epistemologies. In 2014, BARF came to fruition after its founder, Sonja Trauss, read a slow-growth critique by then TechCrunch reporter Kim-Mai Cutler (2014), which amplified a pro-growth solution to San Francisco's housing crisis. Since its formation, BARF has grown into a larger YIMBY movement. Galvanizing momentum on state and national scales, YIMBYism enjoys support from technocapitalists, developers, politicians, and urban think tanks, trumpeting new development, luxury or otherwise, as the only remedy (Bay Area Renters Federation 2014; Swan 2016; Szeto and Meronek
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