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 justice? How might practices such as these act as counterweights to property as a technology of racial dispossession?

Keywords:

• race
• property
• technology
• gentrification
• temporality
• maps
• counter-cartography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 While it is important to theorize the export of US private property relations through formations of US imperialism (Chakravartty and da Silva 2012; Chari and Verdery 2009), and while it is also crucial to study the heterogeneous propertied legacies of other colonialisms globally (Bhandar 2018), here I restrict my focus to the US. This is not to deny the possibility of also engaging Southern theory within the US and its various contact zones (McElroy and Werth 2019; Roy 2017), but rather to bound my focus on US anti-Black property regimes.

2 While my focus here is US-based, I acknowledge anti-Blackness’s global implications, frictions, and entanglements (Chakravartty and da Silva 2012; Kelley 1999; Robinson 1983).

3 My thinking about this has also been informed through my participation in the 2015–2016 ‘Oakland School’ of urban studies, led by Alex Werth and Trisha Barua and supported by the University of California Humanities Research Institute (see McElroy and Werth 2019).

4 While I myself have been a part of the production of much of this AEMP work, particularly report-writing, map-making, and tool crafting, all of what I reference here has involved collaboration with numerous other AEMP members. Further, I was not a core member of the Black Exodus project, which was led by Sofie Vivanco Airaghi, Ariana Faye Allensworth, Robin Crane, Adrienne Hall, Alexandra Lacey, Wynn Newberry, Maya Sisneros, Jin Zhu, and many other dedicated AEMP members. I also want to highlight the artist collaborators of this project, including Mark Harris and William Rhodes of the 3.9 Collective.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Erin McElroy

Erin McElroy is a postdoctoral researcher at New York University’s interdisciplinary AI Now Institute, cofounder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP), and member of the Radical Housing Journal’s editorial collective.