Digital/material housing financialisation and activism in post-crash Dublin

Abstract

This paper’s main argument is that housing financialisation can be understood as a set of intertwined digital/material processes, and that resisting housing financialisation requires activism that recognises and capitalises on this dynamic. Drawing from Desiree Fields’ (2017a) work on urban struggles with financialisation, this conceptual argument is unpacked through a case study of post-crash Dublin, an urban space reshaped by housing financialisation and struggles resisting it. Housing has been a key subject of contention in post-crash Dublin and activists’ digital/material struggles illustrate how digital technologies and platforms can be and are appropriated to resist housing financialisation. The paper traces the intertwining of housing financialisation, resistance, and the digital in post-crash Dublin and argues that future research on platform real estate, urbanism, and automated landlord practices must take seriously the ambivalent opportunities, agency, and counter narratives that housing activists create through their digital/material practices.

Keywords:

• Housing activism
• financialisation
• digital technologies
• automated landlord
• platform real estate

SUBJECT CLASSIFICATION CODES:

• urban studies
• urban geography
• geography

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the reviewers for their insightful comments, which much improved the paper, and Hal Pawson for his encouraging editorial guidance. I’m also very grateful to Özlem Çelik for organising this timely special issue and to Kathleen Stokes for her generous feedback on an earlier draft. Finally, my heartfelt thanks to my thesis supervisor Cian O’Callaghan, without whom I’d be lost. Cian’s kind and insightful feedback has been crucial to this paper and my PhD more generally and, on a more esoteric note, his Quarantunes playlists were a much-appreciated soundtrack to the somewhat tortured process of pulling this paper together during Covid-19 lockdowns – thanks and props to the DJ.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Irish Research Council as part of a Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship.

Notes on contributors

Maedhbh Nic Lochlainn

Maedhbh Nic Lochlainn is an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Geography, School of Natural Sciences, Trinity College Dublin.