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** apologies for x-posting ** Session Title: Real Estate Technologies: Genealogies, Frontiers, & Critiques Call for Papers, 2017 AAG Annual Meeting, Boston, MA Organizers: Will Payne (University of California, Berkeley), Dillon Mahmoudi (Portland State University), Sarah Knuth (University of Michigan) Session Description: The production, perception, and representation of urban space and property relations have been urgent “technological” questions since before the birth of geography as a discipline. From the punctuated modernization of buildings and infrastructure to successive revolutions in the mapping of cities and neighborhoods, both from above and below, cities have been (re)shaped by an ever-advancing technological frontier. Real estate has been at the forefront of this technological deployment and upheaval throughout the modern era. Almost a century ago, the real estate profession’s foundational quest to rationalize property markets and financing radically reshaped buildings and neighborhood plans, rewrote property law, codified appraisal practice - and, for decades after, crystallized spatial patterns of injustice through processes of state-sponsored urban “renewal,” highway construction, and sanctioned exclusion of mortgage financing differentiated by race, class, and location. Today, real estate in global cities, both established and emerging/aspirational, is experiencing yet another major technical and technological boom, as transnational barriers to accumulation and speculation fall and capital (re)discovers urban cores across the Global North. New advanced materials and construction techniques, digital mapping, and frontier forms of property appraisal, marketing, financialization, and exclusion complicate and obfuscate our understandings of real estate as a social, cultural and political economic relation. Futurist visions of smart, digital, and green cities collide with new technologically mediated displacements and resistance struggles. In this session, we argue that critical geographers are poised to offer unique insights into these urban technology politics, past and present. Organizing questions ask how technologies developed and used for real estate: 1) reorder existing exchange practices, spaces, and relationships; 2) capture or create accumulation frontiers; and 3) render property technical, quantifiable, and governable. The session aims to bring together scholars broadly interested in urban geography, critical political economy, and technology studies (whether of STS, Critical GIS/quant, or other stripes). We seek papers which address discursive and/or material relationships between technology, broadly defined, and real estate in its many forms. We welcome papers from a variety of urban contexts and real property regimes. Paper might cover topics as varied as, but need not be limited to: Technologies of real estate appraisal or the use of real estate websites such as Trulia, Zillow, Redfin, and Walk Score;Location-based services like Yelp, Foursquare, and Google Local, and their role in residential gentrification (e.g. Zukin et al. 2015);Local social networks and crime reporting services such as Nextdoor or Nixle;Speculative architectural visualizations and websites (e.g., Rose et al. 2014, Sheller 2009);Efforts to actualize smart cities like the Hudson Yards project (Mattern 2016); Historical “technologies” such as street numbering (Rose-Redwood 2008); The idea of named neighborhoods themselves as "spatial projects" (Madden 2014), often mediated by business interests and other non-state actors;In this spirit of Elvin Wyly’s call for “strategic positivism,” (Wyly 2009) technological projects that aim to thwart or expose the growth machine and speculation, such as the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (antievictionmap.com), “Am I Rent Controlled?”(amirentcontrolled.com) and Property Praxis (propertypraxis.org);Advanced green/cleantech construction, certification and appraisal, and financialization (Knuth 2016, Rydin 2016);New speculation about “fintech” as a vehicle for real estate financialization;Intermediation and the gig/sharing economy, such as Airbnb;Technological obsolescence, blight, and property de/revaluation (Weber 2002);Tech clusters and corporate/real estate bubbles (Bardhan and Walker 2011, McNeill 2016);Futurism and technologically mediated organizing around urban land and property (e.g., urban food movements, Tarr 2015). Interested participants should send abstracts to Will Payne ([log in to unmask]), Dillon Mahmoudi ([log in to unmask]), and Sarah Knuth ([log in to unmask]) by Monday, September 19th. References: Bardhan, Ashok and Walker, Richard. 2011. “California Shrugged: Fountainhead of the Great Recession.” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 4 (3): 303–322.Knuth, Sarah. 2016. “Seeing Green in San Francisco: City as Resource Frontier.” Antipode 48 (3): 626–644.Madden, David J. 2014. “Neighborhood as Spatial Project: Making the Urban Order on the Downtown Brooklyn Waterfront.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38 (2): 471–497.Mattern, Shannon. 2016. “Instrumental City: The View from Hudson Yards.” Places Journal, April. https://placesjournal.org/article/instrumental-city-new-york-hudson-yards/.McNeill, Donald. 2016. “Governing a City of Unicorns: Technology Capital and the Urban Politics of San Francisco.” Urban Geography 37 (4): 494–513.Rose, Gillian, Degen, Monica and Melhuish, Clare. 2014. “Networks, Interfaces, and Computer-Generated Images: Learning from Digital Visualisations of Urban Redevelopment Projects.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32 (3): 386-403.Rose-Redwood, Reuben S. 2008. “From Number to Name: Symbolic Capital, Places of Memory and the Politics of Street Renaming in New York City.” Social & Cultural Geography 9 (4): 431–452.Rydin, Yvonne. 2016. “Sustainability and the Financialisation of Commercial Property: Making Prime and Non-Prime Markets.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34 (4): 745–762. doi:10.1177/0263775816633472.Sheller, Mimi. 2009. “Infrastructures of the Imagined Island: Software, Mobilities, and the Architecture of Caribbean Paradise.” Environment and Planning A 41(6): 1386–1403.Tarr, Alexander. 2015. Have Your City and Eat It Too: Los Angeles and the Urban Food Renaissance. Dissertation, UC Berkeley.Weber, Rachel. 2002. “Extracting Value from the City: Neoliberalism and Urban Redevelopment.” Antipode 34 (3): 519–540.Wyly, Elvin. 2009. “Strategic Positivism.” The Professional Geographer, 61 (3): 310-322.Zukin, Sharon, Lindeman, Scarlett and Hurson, Laurie. 2015. “The Omnivore’s Neighborhood? Online Restaurant Reviews, Race, and Gentrification.” Journal of Consumer Culture, p.1469540515611203. Best, Dillon -- Dillon Mahmoudi PhD Candidate, Urban Studies | Portland State University Research Associate | City Observatory @dillonm | http://dillonm.io