Property as technology

Abstract

This article considers how private property functions as a technology of racial dispossession upon gentrifying terrains, particularly in San Francisco amidst its 'Tech Boom 2.0.' By engaging with collective work produced with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP), by reading the film, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, and by foregrounding critical race studies and urban studies literature, I decenter the novelty of technology in contemporary times. Rather, I consider how property itself has long served as a technology of racial dispossession, constituting a palimpsest for the contemporary gentrifying moment. This, I suggest, is particularly pertinent in theorizing the anti-Blackness of Tech 2.0 urbanism and its new instantiations of property technology, platform real estate, residential surveillance, eviction, and speculation. Thus, I argue that studies of techno-urbanism would do well to consider temporalities outside of their often-reified present. Yet at the same time, I look to community-based projects such as the AEMP which seek to repurpose geospatial technologies and data in order to produce emancipatory propertied futures, for instance, those of expropriation and decommodification. How might studies produced outside of the academy and the real estate industry alike serve as technologies for housing 113 McElroy: Property as technology justice? How might practices such as these act as counterweights to property as a technology of racial dispossession?

Racialized geographies of housing financialization

“…In so doing, they neglect how contemporary financialization contains and reproduces racial logics and violence embedded in capitalism since its inception (Bhandar, 2014; Robinson, 2000). Scholarship on housing financialization must contend with the long-standing function of ‘property as a technology of racial dispossession’ (McElroy, 2020: 114) because without this history, the politics of 21st-century processes of racialized banishment and accumulation are illegible (Roy, 2017).…”

Smart corruption: Satirical strategies for gaming accountability

“…Deeper technical engagements with data-driven tools and the rhetoric of counting are already providing some solutions. Social organizations and movements are finding ways to use data to highlight and push back against structural inequality (Cinnamon, 2019; McElroy, 2020; Mrinali et al, 2022). This work too takes place in the arena of data publics, where visual and textual information is used to expose injustice and advance alternatives.…”

Undoing settler imaginaries: (Re)imagining digital knowledge politics

“…From its cartographic expressions in the form of critical cartography and GIS, to its circulations in the form of GIS as media, to critical data and media studies, the intersection of the digital and geo-visual has deepened the disciplinary breadth of human geography (Wilson, 2017; Zook and Graham, 2007b; Sui and Zhao, 2015; Gieseking, 2017b). For instance, human geography’s engagement with how digitality facilitates spatial hegemony is of urgent concern for understanding the role of the digital in the regulation and production of space (Thatcher et al, 2016; McElroy, 2020). This includes scholarship on the “localness of search results,” the regulation of borders and knowledge, to scholarship in critical cartography long engaged in the ways cartesian representations situated in political economy render space-time for empire (Amoore, 2006; Ballatore et al, 2017; González, 2019; Leszczynski, 2015; Safransky, 2019; Zook and Graham, 2007b).…”

“…Digital geographers have traced the epistemological and ontological underpinnings that shape the relationship between technology and space, including its colonial and carceral features that continue to shape digital-visual regimes and sociospatial relations (Ash, 2017; Jefferson, 2020; Schuurman, 2006; Rose-Redwood et al, 2020; Harley, 1992). This includes the vast terrain of scholarship in which space and technology coalesce to assemble meaning, ideology, place, and the boundaries of the geographic itself (León and Rosen, 2020; Zook and Graham, 2007a; McElroy, 2020; McKittrick and Woods, 2007; McKittrick, 2006).…”