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: