Books by Erin M B McElroy
Duke University Press, 2024
In Silicon Valley Imperialism, Erin McElroy maps the processes of gentrification, racial disposse... more In Silicon Valley Imperialism, Erin McElroy maps the processes of gentrification, racial dispossession, and economic predation that drove the development of Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area and how that logic has become manifest in postsocialist Romania. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Romania and the United States, McElroy exposes the mechanisms through which the appeal of Silicon Valley technocapitalism devours space and societies, displaces residents, and generates extreme income inequality in order to expand its reach. In Romania, dreams of privatization updated fascist and anti-Roma pasts and socialist-era underground computing practices. At the same time, McElroy accounts for the ways Romanians are resisting Silicon Valley capitalist logics, where anticapitalist and anti-imperialist activists and protesters build on socialist-era worldviews not to restore state socialism but rather to establish more just social formations. Attending to the violence of Silicon Valley imperialism, McElroy reveals technocapitalism as an ultimately unsustainable model of rapacious economic and geographic growth.
PM Press, 2021
Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance brings together cart... more Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance brings together cartography, essays, illustrations, poetry, and more in order to depict gentrification and resistance struggles from across the San Francisco Bay Area and act as a roadmap to counter-hegemonic knowledge making and activism. Compiled by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, each chapter reflects different frameworks for understanding the Bay Area’s ongoing urban upheaval, including evictions, indigenous geographies, health and environmental racism, state violence, transportation and infrastructure, migration and relocation, and speculative futures. By weaving these themes together, Counterpoints expands normative urban-studies framings of gentrification to consider more complex, regional, historically grounded, and entangled horizons for understanding the present. Understanding the tech boom and its effects means looking beyond San Francisco’s borders to consider the region as a socially, economically, and politically interconnected whole and reckoning with the area’s deep history of displacement, going back to its first moments of settler colonialism. Counterpoints combines the project's work with contributions by community partners, from longtime community members who have fought multiple waves of racial dispossession to elementary school youth envisioning decolonial futures. In this way, Counterpoints is a collaborative, co-created atlas aimed at expanding knowledge on displacement and resistance in the Bay Area with, rather than for or about, those most impacted.
** Please fill in this form if you'd like a review copy of the book: http://pages.email.taylorand... more ** Please fill in this form if you'd like a review copy of the book: http://pages.email.taylorandfrancis.com/review-copy-request **
Property relations are such a common feature of social life that the complexity of the web of laws, practices, and ideas that allow a property regime to function smoothly are often forgotten. But we are quickly reminded of this complexity when conflict over property erupts. When social actors confront a property regime – for example by squatting – they enact what can be called ‘contested property claims’. As this book demonstrates, these confrontations raise crucial issues of social justice and show the ways in which property conflicts often reflect wider social conflicts. Through a series of case studies from across the globe, this multidisciplinary anthology brings together works from anthropologists, legal scholars, and geographers, who show how exploring contested property claims offers a privileged window onto how property regimes function, as well as an illustration of the many ways that the institution of property shapes power relationships today.
Table of Contents
List of contributors
Preface
Foreword: how property matters
NICHOLAS BLOMLEY
Introduction: disagreement as a window onto property
PATRICK J. L. COCKBURN, MAJA HOJER BRUUN, BJARKE SKÆRLUND RISAGER, AND MIKKEL THORUP
PART 1
Squatting and eviction
1 The right to the city and its limits: contested property claims, urban exceptionality, and the fight for relational space in Glasgow’s Commonwealth Games 2014
NEIL GRAY AND LIBBY PORTER
2 Possession through dispossession: in quest of property and social mobility in urban Brazil
MARIE KOLLING
3 The politics of legal technicalities: an inquiry into the demolition of a Roma EU-migrant settlement in Malmö, Sweden
MARIA PERSDOTTER
4 Urban emptiness, ghost owners and squatters’ challenges to private property
MIGUEL A. MARTÍNEZ
Intermezzos
5 Landed (Freeman’s Wood): an exploration of landownership through contemporary art
JOHN ANGUS AND STOREY G2
6 In the time of Trump: housing, whiteness, and abolition
MANISSA M. MAHARAWAL AND ERIN MCELROY
PART 2
Land rights and conflicting laws
7 The work of ownership: shaping contestation in Ontario’s aggregate extraction disputes
ESTAIR VAN WAGNER
8 Climate adaptation on the Australian east coast
TAYANAH O’DONNELL
9 Property as a technique of jurisdiction: traplines and tenure
SHIRI PASTERNAK
10 Decolonizing neoliberalism? First Nations reserves, private property rights, and the legislation of Indigenous dispossession in Canada
MICHAEL FABRIS (KREBS)
11 Contesting claims to gardens and land: gendered practice in post-war northern Uganda
JULAINA A. OBIKA, BEN ADOL OTTO, SULAYMAN MPISI BABIIHA, AND MICHAEL WHYTE
Afterword: prophecies on property’s probability: climate change and smart contracts in the Anthropocene
BILL MAURER
Index
Peer Reviewed Articles by Erin M B McElroy
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2024
Landlord technology—or the systems used by landlords to control and regulate tenant lives, spaces... more Landlord technology—or the systems used by landlords to control and regulate tenant lives, spaces, and data—frequently promises “frictionless” building management and residential experiences. Yet services such as “digital doormen” and virtual property management platforms often create more work for tenants, particularly regarding decreased accessibility for tenants of color whose faces are unrecognized by biased algorithms used to administer building access, and for renters who are unable to or who refuse to use new apps and web portals. There are also “digital butlers” that landlords deploy as a means of attracting and retaining wealthy residents, yet that end up creating increased and often gendered work for those laboring behind the curtains of automation. Even virtual property management tools rely upon outsourced labor and are rife with contradictions and hardships for renters and call center workers alike. With a proposition that new forms of material and affective labor are created by landlord technologies despite promises of frictionless living, this article focuses on the various struggles that workers and tenants face in using, maintaining, refusing, and, at times, organizing against property automation. Based upon collaborative research produced with Landlord Tech Watch, as well as ethnographic accounting of housing and labor struggles in New York City and Cluj, this article introduces friction as a critical analytic useful in assessing the uneven, gendered, and racialized labor formations that landlord technologies require and reproduce despite fictions of frictionless living.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH, 2023
In this article I place tenant screening data grabbing practices in tension with the ongoing work... more In this article I place tenant screening data grabbing practices in tension with the ongoing work of housing justice-based tool making. While the tenant screening industry has spent decades amassing eviction data to facilitate the blocklisting of tenants with prior eviction records and thereby reifying racial capitalist geographies, housing organizers today rely on some of this same data to illuminate evictor networks and organize anti-eviction campaigns. This has been particularly important in the wake of corporate landlordism in which evictions are executed through opaque shell companies. Tenant-made tools attempt to undo this uneven landscape in which landlords own troves of data about tenants, but in which tenants don't even know their own landlords' names. While opening up all eviction data to the public might appear to be an antidote, doing so can also provide screening companies with even more data to use in blocklisting. In my examination of this conjuncture, I forge the analytic of dis/possessory data politics to map out the violence of tenant screening data predation while also problematizing the technoliberal impulse to open up all eviction data. Yet dis/possessory data politics also attest to care and coalition work marked by practices of possession beyond logics of theft, banishment and techno solutionism.
ACME, 2022
This paper examines the materiality of digitally mapping eviction and landlord geographies, focus... more This paper examines the materiality of digitally mapping eviction and landlord geographies, focusing on struggles and contradictions that critical GIS and counter-mapping collectives encounter in attempting to produce data, maps, and tools useful for housing justice organizing. I look at how public restrictions of parcel ownership and eviction data, along with limited accessibility of free and open source mapping software, often instantiate increased reliance upon technocapitalist data and infrastructure. Many of these systems are precipitative of gentrification geographies, thereby at odds with the politics of antidisplacement mapping. Meanwhile, there are a growing number of cartographic labs and companies that produce geospatial data related to evictions and property ownership, but that prioritize data accumulation and scalability over grounded housing justice. By exploring paradoxes within this space, I theorize the conjuncture of datafied property and propertied data landscapes. Homing in on San Francisco landscapes of the Tech Boom 2.0., I draw upon my own experience working with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and partner groups. I conclude by looking to housing justice and land rematriation practices based upon grounded relationalities-models that offer emancipatory trajectories for digitally mapping property and dispossession.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2022
This paper focuses on surveillance technologies that New York City landlords have been installing... more This paper focuses on surveillance technologies that New York City landlords have been installing in low-income, public, and affordable tenant housing over the last decade. It looks at how new forms of biometric and facial recognition-based landlord technology automate gentrification and carcerality, reproducing racist systems of recognition and displacement. We offer these systems a genealogy and geography, looking at intersections of zoning, gentrification, eviction, and policing that have historically solidified to dispossess and incarcerate tenants of color. Additionally, this paper addresses how and why New York City has emerged as the world's epicenter of "landlord tech," mapping out several decades of urban datafication that have rendered low-income, nonwhite majority housing complexes as laboratories for surveillance experimentations today. We observe how processes of "catching" tenants for lease violations automate a longer history of racist surveillance and property-making. Yet we also highlight tenant-led resistance that has successfully thwarted facial recognition deployment and that continues to organize for landlord tech abolition today. Through affective organizing, grounded relationality, and alliance-building, tenants have created vital abolitionist space and knowledge to curb landlord technologies and the carceral logics they encode.
Catalyst: Feminist, Theory, Technoscience, 2020
This article explores socialist and postsocialist technoculture in postsocialist Romania, focusin... more This article explores socialist and postsocialist technoculture in postsocialist Romania, focusing upon both retrospective and speculative accounts of what did, and what could have, transpired beyond the purview of the state and of capitalism. Upon a backdrop of postsocialist Siliconization and Western anticorruption politics, it looks to queer, corrupt, and deviant technological practices that pervert normative and Western accounts of socialism and its transition. In particular, this article sifts through speculative and retrospective accounts of hackers, computer cloners, and political artists and organizers, many of whom narrate technocultural practices of șmecherie—a Romanian word with Romani roots inferring cunningness and cleverness. These narrations, imaginations, and speculations, I suggest, corrupt postsocialist Siliconization and anticorruption politics through practices of cloning, play, excess, and kinship.
City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, 2020
This article considers how private property functions as a technology
of racial dispossession upo... more 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 justice? How might practices such as these act as counterweights to property as a technology of racial dispossession?
Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies, 2019
This paper investigates the coloniality of contemporary digital nomadism, an identity that numer... more This paper investigates the coloniality of contemporary digital nomadism, an identity that numerous Western tech workers use to describe lifestyles of location independence in which they travel the world while maintaining Silicon Valley salaries. Specifically, I assess colonial genealogies of digital nomads and more problematically defined “digital Gypsies.” It was during the height of 19th-century Western European imperialism that Romantic Orientalist texts proliferated, celebrating the racial and sexual “free and wandering Gypsy.” This deracinated figure was used to allegorize colonial desires and imperial violence alike. As I suggest, nomadic racial fantasy undergirds contemporary freedom desires today emergent from the heart of a new empire—that of Silicon Valley. In describing Silicon Valley imperialism and its posthuman digital avatar, I assess how nomadic fantasy transits technologies of gentrification into new frontiers. For instance, sharing economy platforms such as Airbnb celebrate the digital nomad, bolstering contexts of racial dispossession while continuing to deracinate Roma lifeworlds. Might nomad exotica in fact index coloniality and its ability to traverse time and space? How has this fantasy been abstracted over time, also entangling with posthumanist nomadic onto-epistemologies?
Urban Studies, 2019
This paper studies the arrival of digital nomads in Cluj, Romania. I focus upon double dispossess... more 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.
Antipode, 2019
This paper challenges dominant geographies of urban theory by conceptualising the dynamics of dis... more 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.
Urban Geography, 2019
This article situates the 2015 rebranding of Zuckerberg San Francisco General within San Francisc... more This article situates the 2015 rebranding of Zuckerberg San Francisco General within San Francisco’s technopolitical landscape. After Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg donated to the hospital, thereby acquiring naming rights, local toponymical tension percolated. This was in part due to Facebook’s gentrifying role in the city and the racial violence such processes constitute, as well as ongoing practices data colonialism. The latter includes Facebook’s attempt at pairing hospital data with user data in order to augment its scope into intimate and bodily geographies. In exploring the intertwining of gentrification and data colonialism, here I forge the concept of techno-imperialism as an analytic and as a point of departure in understanding Facebook’s multi-scalar impacts. As I suggest, the transformation of “The General” to “The Zuckerberg” indexes the company's techno-imperiality, as well as its efforts to mask its dispossessive impacts.
American Quarterly, 2018
In an era in which digital web mapping and data visualization projects
have taken over the media ... more In an era in which digital web mapping and data visualization projects
have taken over the media and the twenty-four-hour news cycle, in which
“gentrification” has become a buzzword used to describe urban mutations
across the planet without nuance, what does it mean to be an anticapitalist,
antiracist, and feminist digital cartography collective working outside the formal boundaries of academe, the nonprofit industrial complex, and the media? Further, in times in which technocapitalism rampantly incites new forms of racialized dispossession on a growing array of technoscapes, what does it mean to use technology to provide data, tools, narratives, and analytics to counter gentrifying tides? These are but some of the many questions that we at the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP)—a data visualization, data analysis, and digital storytelling collective that documents dispossession and resistance on gentrifying landscapes—are tasked with daily, some of which I begin to unpack in this forum on the intersections of American studies and digital humanities (DH). Specifically, I explore not only how American studies and DH frame the AEMP’s methodologies, but also how these fields differentiate us within an ever-growing constellation of digital mapping practices.
Berkeley Planning Journal, 2018
In this article, we trace the emergence of the false YIMBY/NIMBY dialectic now dominant in San Fr... more In this article, we trace the emergence of the false YIMBY/NIMBY dialectic now dominant in San Francisco housing rights discourse, studying its constitution and material effects. Specifically, we investigate how racial capitalism is constitutive of both YIMBYism and NIMBYism, drawing upon Cedric Robinson’s argument that racialization has always been constitutive of capitalism, and racism is requisite for capitalism’s endurance. We make our argument by drawing upon empirical research conducted by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP), a data analysis, oral history, and critical cartography collective of which we are both a part. We also draw upon collaborative research between AEMP and community-based housing rights nonprofits and local housing justice organizing efforts, as well as literary and cultural analysis. Such a methodological approach facilitates the unearthing of the racial logics undergirding YIMBYism, pointing to the need for alternative analytics to theorize and mobilize against heightened forms of racialized dispossession. We begin by outlining San Francisco’s YIMBY and NIMBY genealogies, and then proceed to unravel the basic statistical logic underpinning YIMBYism. In doing so, we introduce an additional analytic that we argue is requisite for deconstructing YIMBY algorithms: aesthetic desires of wealthy newcomers. In doing so, we suggest that the YIMBY “build, baby, build” housing solution fails when architectural and neighborhood fantasies are taken into account. We then study now racialized surveillance informs not only the NIMBY but also the YIMBY gaze, arguing that both camps are ultimately tethered to racial capitalism’s liberal legacies.
Social Identities, 2018
This paper portrays spatial and racial San Francisco Bay Area enactments of dispossession emergen... more This paper portrays spatial and racial San Francisco Bay Area enactments of dispossession emergent in the wake of the ‘Tech Boom 2.0’, offering a contextual Cold War and postsocialist genealogy. Both the Dot Com Boom and its contemporary successor, I argue, are events only made possible by the cessation of the Cold War, which incited new consumer-driven Silicon Valley models. This facilitated Silicon Valley temporal penetration both into its peripheral urbanities and into formerly Communist space, gentrifying non-Silicon Valley Time and social/political worlds. Such Bay Area urban disruptions have fomented new forms of resistance, despair, and nihilism, all countering techno-utopics of the Tech Boom 2.0. These protests and affective worlds too are haunted by the ghosts of futures past, harkening to futurities beyond narratives of techno-utopic inevitability, globality, and liberalism. Therefore, the oppositional worlds responsive to techno-utopic dissemination too are situated within a postsocialist temporal and spatial geography. As such, I argue that postsocialism, as an analytic, is prerequisite in indexing not only epistemologies surrounding the phenomenon today discoursed as tech-induced gentrification and its global condition, but also, of the social worlds emerging to combat it.
Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2018
The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project is a data visualization, data analysis, and oral history collec... more The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project is a data visualization, data analysis, and oral history collective documenting gentrification and resistance in the San Francisco Bay Area. In this article, we discuss the history and methodology of our narrative mapmaking, situating our work in the tradition of critical geography, critical race studies, as well as feminist and decolonial science studies. Aligned with activist work that is fighting for a future beyond the current tech-dominated political economy of speculative real estate and venture capital, our project maps sites of resistance, while remembering spaces lost and struggled for. In this article, we highlight the connections between countermapping, oral history, and housing justice work.
Media-N, 2017
This paper situates the birth and death of anti-eviction protests correlative with San Francisco'... more This paper situates the birth and death of anti-eviction protests correlative with San Francisco's Tech Boom as temporally mediated by the media itself. Specifically, I look at the media's conflation with anti-eviction and anti-technology, and its fictive narrations of anti-eviction protests as being anti-technology. Because of the thinness of this fiction and its impossibility of materializing, the media had to kill its own spectacle - a death which reverberated in the material realm. Drawing upon cultural and media analysis, along with critical race and feminist science and technology studies, I question ontological differences between representation and objects of representation. At the same time, I look to alternative media technology projects, such as the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, that have emerged to offer variant technological possibilities, as well as alternative temporal approaches to protest materiality. How do these projects shatter the dialectical narrative structure clung to by other media— the idea of technology either being good or bad, or of the anti-gentrification movement envisioned as dead or still breathing?
Book Chapters by Erin M B McElroy
Housing Displacement: Conceptual and Methodological Issues, 2020
This chapter draws upon Anti-Eviction Mapping Project analyses, Eviction Free San Francisco parti... more This chapter draws upon Anti-Eviction Mapping Project analyses, Eviction Free San Francisco participant observation, and Limited Liability Company (LLC) research in order to theorize the role of speculation and shell companies in San Francisco's eviction crisis. It looks at how speculation is constitutive of Ellis Act evictions in California. The chapter offers a brief history of shell companies and LLCs, particularly as they rest upon ongoing colonial speculation. The chapter concludes by placing real estate speculation within a deeper genealogy of settler colonialism, gesturing to the possibility of decolonizing speculation.
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Books by Erin M B McElroy
Property relations are such a common feature of social life that the complexity of the web of laws, practices, and ideas that allow a property regime to function smoothly are often forgotten. But we are quickly reminded of this complexity when conflict over property erupts. When social actors confront a property regime – for example by squatting – they enact what can be called ‘contested property claims’. As this book demonstrates, these confrontations raise crucial issues of social justice and show the ways in which property conflicts often reflect wider social conflicts. Through a series of case studies from across the globe, this multidisciplinary anthology brings together works from anthropologists, legal scholars, and geographers, who show how exploring contested property claims offers a privileged window onto how property regimes function, as well as an illustration of the many ways that the institution of property shapes power relationships today.
Table of Contents
List of contributors
Preface
Foreword: how property matters
NICHOLAS BLOMLEY
Introduction: disagreement as a window onto property
PATRICK J. L. COCKBURN, MAJA HOJER BRUUN, BJARKE SKÆRLUND RISAGER, AND MIKKEL THORUP
PART 1
Squatting and eviction
1 The right to the city and its limits: contested property claims, urban exceptionality, and the fight for relational space in Glasgow’s Commonwealth Games 2014
NEIL GRAY AND LIBBY PORTER
2 Possession through dispossession: in quest of property and social mobility in urban Brazil
MARIE KOLLING
3 The politics of legal technicalities: an inquiry into the demolition of a Roma EU-migrant settlement in Malmö, Sweden
MARIA PERSDOTTER
4 Urban emptiness, ghost owners and squatters’ challenges to private property
MIGUEL A. MARTÍNEZ
Intermezzos
5 Landed (Freeman’s Wood): an exploration of landownership through contemporary art
JOHN ANGUS AND STOREY G2
6 In the time of Trump: housing, whiteness, and abolition
MANISSA M. MAHARAWAL AND ERIN MCELROY
PART 2
Land rights and conflicting laws
7 The work of ownership: shaping contestation in Ontario’s aggregate extraction disputes
ESTAIR VAN WAGNER
8 Climate adaptation on the Australian east coast
TAYANAH O’DONNELL
9 Property as a technique of jurisdiction: traplines and tenure
SHIRI PASTERNAK
10 Decolonizing neoliberalism? First Nations reserves, private property rights, and the legislation of Indigenous dispossession in Canada
MICHAEL FABRIS (KREBS)
11 Contesting claims to gardens and land: gendered practice in post-war northern Uganda
JULAINA A. OBIKA, BEN ADOL OTTO, SULAYMAN MPISI BABIIHA, AND MICHAEL WHYTE
Afterword: prophecies on property’s probability: climate change and smart contracts in the Anthropocene
BILL MAURER
Index
Peer Reviewed Articles by Erin M B McElroy
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 justice? How might practices such as these act as counterweights to property as a technology of racial dispossession?
have taken over the media and the twenty-four-hour news cycle, in which
“gentrification” has become a buzzword used to describe urban mutations
across the planet without nuance, what does it mean to be an anticapitalist,
antiracist, and feminist digital cartography collective working outside the formal boundaries of academe, the nonprofit industrial complex, and the media? Further, in times in which technocapitalism rampantly incites new forms of racialized dispossession on a growing array of technoscapes, what does it mean to use technology to provide data, tools, narratives, and analytics to counter gentrifying tides? These are but some of the many questions that we at the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP)—a data visualization, data analysis, and digital storytelling collective that documents dispossession and resistance on gentrifying landscapes—are tasked with daily, some of which I begin to unpack in this forum on the intersections of American studies and digital humanities (DH). Specifically, I explore not only how American studies and DH frame the AEMP’s methodologies, but also how these fields differentiate us within an ever-growing constellation of digital mapping practices.
Book Chapters by Erin M B McElroy
Property relations are such a common feature of social life that the complexity of the web of laws, practices, and ideas that allow a property regime to function smoothly are often forgotten. But we are quickly reminded of this complexity when conflict over property erupts. When social actors confront a property regime – for example by squatting – they enact what can be called ‘contested property claims’. As this book demonstrates, these confrontations raise crucial issues of social justice and show the ways in which property conflicts often reflect wider social conflicts. Through a series of case studies from across the globe, this multidisciplinary anthology brings together works from anthropologists, legal scholars, and geographers, who show how exploring contested property claims offers a privileged window onto how property regimes function, as well as an illustration of the many ways that the institution of property shapes power relationships today.
Table of Contents
List of contributors
Preface
Foreword: how property matters
NICHOLAS BLOMLEY
Introduction: disagreement as a window onto property
PATRICK J. L. COCKBURN, MAJA HOJER BRUUN, BJARKE SKÆRLUND RISAGER, AND MIKKEL THORUP
PART 1
Squatting and eviction
1 The right to the city and its limits: contested property claims, urban exceptionality, and the fight for relational space in Glasgow’s Commonwealth Games 2014
NEIL GRAY AND LIBBY PORTER
2 Possession through dispossession: in quest of property and social mobility in urban Brazil
MARIE KOLLING
3 The politics of legal technicalities: an inquiry into the demolition of a Roma EU-migrant settlement in Malmö, Sweden
MARIA PERSDOTTER
4 Urban emptiness, ghost owners and squatters’ challenges to private property
MIGUEL A. MARTÍNEZ
Intermezzos
5 Landed (Freeman’s Wood): an exploration of landownership through contemporary art
JOHN ANGUS AND STOREY G2
6 In the time of Trump: housing, whiteness, and abolition
MANISSA M. MAHARAWAL AND ERIN MCELROY
PART 2
Land rights and conflicting laws
7 The work of ownership: shaping contestation in Ontario’s aggregate extraction disputes
ESTAIR VAN WAGNER
8 Climate adaptation on the Australian east coast
TAYANAH O’DONNELL
9 Property as a technique of jurisdiction: traplines and tenure
SHIRI PASTERNAK
10 Decolonizing neoliberalism? First Nations reserves, private property rights, and the legislation of Indigenous dispossession in Canada
MICHAEL FABRIS (KREBS)
11 Contesting claims to gardens and land: gendered practice in post-war northern Uganda
JULAINA A. OBIKA, BEN ADOL OTTO, SULAYMAN MPISI BABIIHA, AND MICHAEL WHYTE
Afterword: prophecies on property’s probability: climate change and smart contracts in the Anthropocene
BILL MAURER
Index
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 justice? How might practices such as these act as counterweights to property as a technology of racial dispossession?
have taken over the media and the twenty-four-hour news cycle, in which
“gentrification” has become a buzzword used to describe urban mutations
across the planet without nuance, what does it mean to be an anticapitalist,
antiracist, and feminist digital cartography collective working outside the formal boundaries of academe, the nonprofit industrial complex, and the media? Further, in times in which technocapitalism rampantly incites new forms of racialized dispossession on a growing array of technoscapes, what does it mean to use technology to provide data, tools, narratives, and analytics to counter gentrifying tides? These are but some of the many questions that we at the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP)—a data visualization, data analysis, and digital storytelling collective that documents dispossession and resistance on gentrifying landscapes—are tasked with daily, some of which I begin to unpack in this forum on the intersections of American studies and digital humanities (DH). Specifically, I explore not only how American studies and DH frame the AEMP’s methodologies, but also how these fields differentiate us within an ever-growing constellation of digital mapping practices.
In what follows, I first introduce how a connected approach can supplement comparative work in mapping housing justice. I then theorize data and housing justice together, troubling the moment in which eviction data itself has
become commodified. Lastly, I introduce the work of the AEMP, focusing on how we have sought to make connected maps of evictions and resistance.
Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (2018) AEMP Handbook by The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP). In: Capous-Desyllas M., Morgaine K. (eds) Creating Social Change Through Creativity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52129-9_16
Fremont, and Oakland become a bit more lucid. The conclusions and questions that we invoke through this report data are conceived of collectively, amongst AEMP members and in collaboration with our community partners. While we bring our own situated knowledges to the analytics that inform this report, and as such invoke race and class spatial analysis, we don’t claim that there is any one true geographic description of the contours of Alameda County gentrification. We do believe in the importance of employing what Kim Tallbear describes as “objectivity in action,” or inquiring not at a distance, but as situated within the spaces
that we study. As such, we find it important not to produce data “for” impacted communities, but with those experiencing heterogeneous aspects of Alameda County urban change. We have made conscious decisions to curate and relate certain data sets together based on the analysis of our various partners, storytellers, and members.
Edited by Conor Tomás Reed, Manissa McCleave Maharawal and Alma Sheppard-Matsuo
Co-authored with Karyn Smoot
The RHJ Editorial Collective are Ana Vilenica, Erin McElroy, Mara Ferreri, Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia, Melissa García-Lamarca and Michele Lancione.
Edited by Alejandra Reyes, Ana Vilenica, Claire Bowman, Elana Eden, Erin McElroy and Michele Lancione
Together with a feminist, anti-racist and horizontally organized collective made of 13 people (10 women, 3 men) scattered across the globe, we have been working very hard in the last three years to bring this project to fruition. Following the successful launch of our first issue at the 2019 AAG in Washington, we are now actively looking for high quality contributions to be published in 2020, addressing the root causes of housing injustice, its experiences and resistance.
Contributors interested in expanding the public impact of their work are invited to consider how their research speaks to the ongoing housing crisis in the Bay Area and submit a proposal (<500 word) describing
(a) the data and/or narrative they would like to contribute,
(b) how their submission contributes to understanding and/or resisting the forces behind displacement in the Bay Area today, and
(c) how their submission fits into one or more of the themes listed below.
You may also simply submit a map, image or data visualization that you feel communicates something powerful about one of the below themes.
We are happy to consider visual work that has already appeared in other publications, assuming permission can be granted. Similarly, if you have amateur cartographic or GIS work that you feel communicates something important but is not quite professional in quality, don’t hesitate to submit. The AEMP will work closely with researchers throughout the editorial process to help visualize or revisualize data (e.g. stylize cartographic data, illustrate narrative data) and integrate contributors voices into the final atlas in the form of self-attributed, written contributions of approximately 1000 words each.
The AEMP is particularly interested in submissions that explore the themes of: colonialism and indigenous resistance; evictions; migration/relocation; public health, public housing, and environmental racism; land speculation; the gentrification-to-prison pipeline; and transportation infrastructure and economy. Please see below or more information on each of these themes.
We are also particularly interested in work that incorporates the full Bay Area, or those parts of the Bay Area not commonly discussed or studied, including parts of Northern California impacted by the region’s transformation which may not be part of the formal 9-county region.
Please submit all proposals to [email protected] by March 4, 2018.