The session recording will be archived on the site until June 25th, 2023

This session was streamed but not recorded

Curated Track: 

Description:

From Sanborn atlases to web APIs, from HOLC’s “redlining” maps to computer-generated “neighborhood scores,” methods for cataloging information about the value, ownership, and characteristics of real property have drastically transformed over the last century. Providing the context for all kinds of decisions within property markets, real estate data plays a significant and often exclusionary role in the modern form of highly financialized racial capitalism.

The growing prominence of proptech, landlord tech (McElroy and Vergerio 2022), “algorithmic planning” (Safransky 2020), and “platform urbanism” (Fields et al. 2020) has dramatically reshaped the real estate landscape. While the technologies that represent this “conjuncture of datified property and propertied data” (McElroy 2022) may be new, real estate capital’s preoccupation with data is decidedly not. In this session, we will explore the links between contemporary technological developments in real estate data and their historical antecedents.

Building on the notion that real estate is and has always been a political proposition, this session invites papers that critically examine the current and historical production, accumulation, management, representation, and transaction of real estate data. Papers in this session examine the historical and geographical threads interwoven through contemporary property markets, including the legacies of historical forms of real estate data management; what data-driven approaches fail to capture about property markets; the role of real estate data within processes of racialized/gendered accumulation by dispossession; and emancipatory uses of real estate data for such projects as tenant unionization or eviction defense.

Non-Presenting Participants