Development from Above: Technocultures and Techno-solutions of the YIMBY Movement

Keywords: housing, dispossession, development, technology, feminist studies, urban studies
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

The last decade has seen a pro-development Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY) spring up and connect multiple cities in the US and beyond, often espousing that free market logics will solve gentrification crises. While their movement maintains historical pro-development precedence, and while it has been importantly critiqued by tenants, housing organizers, and anti-capitalist urban studies scholars alike who continue to highlight the dispossessive impacts of YIMBY analyses, here I engage a feminist and anticolonial perspective to critique the movement’s technocultural and techno-solutionist engagements. I am particularly interested in how and why YIMBYism emerged in San Francisco amidst the dawn of the so-called Tech Boom 2.0. During this time, real estate interests chased those of big tech and materialized new waves of racial dispossession. Not only have a number of YIMBY leaders and constituents been entwined within the tech industry, but also, they have also galvanized tech platforms in making their arguments. While mapping this out, at the same time in this paper I look to the movement’s espousal of techno-solutionism and developmentalism to trace an imperial epistemological genealogy. Drawing upon San Francisco-based housing organizing experience, as well as anticolonial, feminist technology studies, and critical race studies literature, this paper thereby troubles the frameworks of YIMBY arguments, tactics, and culture to conceptualize more spatially just urban geographies.