Analog alternatives to the urban platform
In our final installment of this four-part cities on cities and technology, we wrap up our conversations on smart cities, urban platforms, knowledge production, and civic intelligence by exploring alternative approaches to urban transformation – analog and digital. Tune in to learn more about the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, the changing geography of carbon economies, and what post offices and hardware stores can teach us about community.
Guests
David Banks, SUNY, University at Albany
Ryan Burns, University of Calgary
Ayonna Datta, University College London
Shannon Mattern, University of Pennsylvania
Erin McElroy, University of Washington
John Stehlin, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Reading List
David Banks (2023), The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
Eliot Tretter & Ryan Burns (2023), “Digital transformations of the urban-carbon-labor nexus: A research agenda,” Digital Geography and Society.
Ayona Datta & Nabeela Ahmed (2020), “Intimate infrastructures: The rubrics of gendered safety and urban violence in Kerala, India,” Geoforum 110.
Shannon Mattern (2018), “Maintenance and care,” Places.
Shannon Mattern (2018), “Community Plumbing,” Places.
Shannon Mattern (2019), “Fugitive Libraries,” Places.
Erin McElroy (2017), “Mediating the tech boom: Temporalities of displacement and resistance,” Media-N 13:1.
Erin McElroy (2023), “Dis/Possessory data politics: From tenant screening to anti-eviction organizing,” IJURR 47:1.
The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project
John Stehlin & Will Payne (2022), “Disposable infrastructures: ‘Micromobility’ platforms and the political economy of transport disruption in Austin, Texas,” Urban Studies.
Credits
Many thanks to the Lindy Institute for Urban Innovation at Drexel University, the managing editors at Urban Affairs Review, and our guests for sharing their time and insights with us. The show’s music is “Hundred Mile” by K2, courtesy of Blue Dot Sessions.
Producer and sound engineer: David Weems, Drexel University
Executive Producer and writer: Emily Holloway, Associate Managing Editor, Urban Affairs Review.
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Ayona Datta
So I mean, I would say generally with all smart cities initiatives, whether it is we're thinking about gender or ethnicity or caste or religion, I think it's important to understand that technology cannot be a silver bullet for all sorts of social problems, and certainly cannot be a silver bullet for any social problem. Technology is basically a complement to doing things right in terms of governance, in terms of implementation, in terms of, you know, law enforcement. But it cannot be a substitute for all of that and certainly with really complex issues around intersectional marginalization. Women, low income, neighborhoods, et cetera. It's so complex that technology is not the solution to that complexity at all.
Emily Holloway
Hi, this is Emily Holloway, and you're listening to UAR Remixed. You just heard from Ayona Datta, a professor of geography at University College London. In this final installment of our four-part miniseries on Cities and Technology, we're revisiting some of the major themes and topics we touched on so far, like Smart cities, platform logics and data from slightly different angles. We try to get at the messy entanglements of technology and place the radical premise of maintaining technological infrastructures rather than innovating brand-new ones, and how place-based activism can subvert the tools and tactics of big data and big tech. David Banks, who we've heard from earlier in this series, recently published a book about how small cities and economic transition, like in Central New York State where his study is focused, leverage attention grabbing social media strategies to construct a new place based identity that is founded on a perception of authenticity. During our conversation, I asked him if there was any risk in conflating authenticity, even if it's fabricated, with a kind of conservative or jingoistic attitude towards change.
David Banks
I do warn that in general it's sort of a conclusion I come to about everything about moving and gesturing toward authenticity, is that this generally seems dangerous because one, it will always let you down, right? For all those kind of like, those boiling contradictions that we've been talking about, but also because you know it is ultimately backwards looking in a lot of respects and when we when we want like something authentic, what often what we're saying is you know we want something that's immutable to change. And there's a lot of stuff that does need to be changed in this country, in society more broadly. And so I'm much more interested in just kind of doing things that are full and productive and community building and that those things will feel authentic once you do new stuff. I have like a prescription there it's like you know be very tentative to an egalitarian economy and build a culture around that and that will feel much more fulfilling than like making these constructions of things from the past. I think it's more important and that's why you know, some of the tourism study work that I look at like we'll make like these typologies of authenticity and of branding – and they all sort of go to like the end point is always about identification of the self and the object that you are asked to relate to, whether that's a tourism experience or a branded commodity, right? Like all of them in all these different areas, the end result is always like just maintenance of that relationship. And I think what we're maintaining and who the actors are, you know, these big corporations versus kind of atomized individuals, that doesn't seem particularly great. You know, going way back to, you know, like philosophers of the romantic period and stuff, right, like what they would say is kind of like the most fulfilling authentic relationship among people are usually things that you freely accept, right, that this is what Rousseau says. For example, right, is that you would grow up in a in a town and then leave. And then choose to come back and that is that fear of negation or the threat of negation, right? That like everyone has the opportunity to say, let's stop this, and they choose not to. That's where you get inauthentic community from. And I think that when we sort of recycle the past that I don't feel like we're doing that.
Emily Holloway
David's work looks at some of the aesthetics of recycling the past, particularly in the place-based identities that are being cultivated in postindustrial communities. There's definitely an interesting relationship at work here between heritage and belonging, but as this book points out, this relationship is still being mediated. Not only by social media platforms like Instagram. Or TikTok. But more importantly, by concrete factors like real estate investments or speculation. Erin McElroy, an assistant professor at the University of Washington, found herself immersed in similar dynamics as a housing justice activist in the Bay Area. Erin, can you talk about how you got started in your work on evictions, maybe paint kind of a picture for our listeners of what was going on in the Bay Area at the time?
Erin McElroy
You know, again in San Francisco, I guess we can say with the.com boom and this sort of that economy literally booming overnight, there was a surge of you know, people flocking to the cities and people called it the second gold rush basically to make money off of all of these dot coms and of course the real estate industry saw that and were smart enough to try to capitalize upon that. So what we saw was that evictions went up overnight, as you know property from your rental costs and of course that was an over-confident investment in mostly software and then there was the foreclosure crisis and then this sort of second.com. I was part of a group called Eviction for San Francisco for some years and we were a direct action mutual aid group and would organize with tenants who are being evicted to help them fight their evictions. And often we would just try to find where their landlords lived or worked, and we held demonstrations outside of those places really to put pressure on individual landlords. There was this one case where Google's head of e-security had bought this building, a Victorian building right in between, right on the edge of the Mission, the Castro districts and there were seven units in the building, each with different families or individuals. He evicted one right away to move in himself and then proceeded to give eviction notices to other tenants really to kind of convert this Victorian into this big, you know, private home for himself. And we had already been, you know, organizing against, we have found that something like 69% of evictions took place near what we'll call these Google bus stops. Google, Facebook, Apple, Netflix, etc. Companies based in Silicon Valley, which is about an hour south, whether we're talking about Mountain View or Palo Alto or what have you, had started using this private luxury transportation service to attract workers to move to San Francisco because they knew they would get a better quality who would if somebody knew that they could live in a cool, hip city rather than have to live in like the quote-unquote foreign suburbs. Right. So, they started advertising like, ohh, come work for Google. You don't even have to live in Mountain View, you can live in the Mission and they would show all these murals or something like that, so really capitalizing upon the cultural work and people in San Francisco.
Emily Holloway
So how did you and your collaborators end up getting from this early stage of urban change? Like the speculation that was prompted by tech companies in neighborhoods like the Mission to co-founding the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project?
Erin McElroy
And then they started using public bus stops illegally. Normally you get fined if you use a public bus stop for a private, you know, transportation services in San Francisco. But there was this kind of secret deal that they made with the Municipal Transportation agency and so suddenly evictions started, you know, picking up around these bus stops because you could go on Craigslist at the time or, you know, Zillow or Trulia and see that properties would be advertised as one block from the Google bus stop or two blocks from the Apple bus stop. And so we started blockading these bus stops. Sometimes when the Google buses would come and these actions became known as the Google Bus blockades. So we were doing that but also very aware of this correlation between real estate capital and tech capital, the sort of, you know, in the urban fabric of the city. In terms of evictions that what had happened with Google's head of the E-Security I mentioned earlier was that he actually bought the building himself. So it wasn't that real estate was buying buildings for tech, but here somebody in tech became the landlord and tried to evict all the tenants but also he installed the security camera right in that unit in order to basically punish the tenants for organizing or to kind of biopolitically instill this fear that if they organized against their eviction, he would know and be able to be kind of preemptive and penalize them. I always think about that as just this moment in which it was real estate capital and tech Capital and then also kind of these new surveillance systems kind of converging in this way to push people out and also to punish them for organizing against their own dispossession, really using technology being created and designed, and using different, you know, data servers and also using relationships with the city and in these kind of entangled overlapping ways to kind of transform San Francisco into a city for that kind of you know, quintessential Google, you know, white collar worker. But unlike that case of Google's head of security, what we started to notice was that the majority of tenants who were coming to our meetings actually didn't know who was evicting them. They knew that some anonymous sounding shell company, but that ended with LLC or LP, like limited liability company or limited partnership, had bought their building. Often there would be a story like, ohh we knew our landlord for decades. Our landlord just sold the building to 55 Dolores St. LLC. They might live at 55 Dolores St. We don't know who 55 Dolores St. LLC is, but we know that we just got an eviction notice from them and so there became this sort of dire need and housing organizing at the time and that still exists to basically identify who these corporate landlords are, who are strategically behind not just one shell company but behind entire networks of shell companies. So you might have one investment company. In the case of 55 Dolores St., there was an investment company called Urban Green Investments that had used dozen different shell companies like 55 Dolores St. LLC, 1049 Carrera St. LLC to buy individual buildings and then evict tenants through their shell companies. And doing that allowed Urban Green Investments to bypass certain tenant protections that wouldn't have allowed them to evict those buildings in that same way. But without research, we wouldn't have known that.
Emily Holloway
Oh wow. OK. So you just started tracing the ownership to figure out where all these changes were coming from.
Erin McElroy
That you know, these shell companies were connected and through research we were able to figure out, OK, there's actually one investment company. They have a parent company in Colorado, like there was suddenly became different nodes that we could use and organizing in which we could exert pressure. You know, we could show up to their headquarters and we could bring tenants together across different buildings and create a stronger movement, and so anyway that sort of need for data and information about how landlords and corporate real estate is organized became the impetus for this project called the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, which I cofounded in 2013. And so initially we produced one map of all the evictions that we could track in San Francisco and try to identify who was behind the different shell companies. But the project quickly grew in really unexpected ways. It's a collective. So we're not a nonprofit. We're not a not-for-profit. It's a collective of volunteers who come from lots of different backgrounds and bring different skills with them. And you know, we make maps. We also make zines, murals. We have an atlas that we published in 2021 with PM press. We're currently working on a piece of software that we've developed which was really weird for me to say, but it's an evictor book and it's actually a lookup tool. So you can look up an address or you can look up a shell company and see all of the different properties that that landlord owns across their portfolio and how they're connected to different companies, but we also do, like I said, a lot of narrative based work that might show up in murals or zines, we produce oral histories
Emily Holloway
So what else does the team work on?
Erin McElroy
And really, yeah, everything we do kind of depends on who's in the room, and so we it's not like we have one model that we just use for all of our work, but because it's a volunteer based collective people, people come and people go. And I think what's consistent is that we maintain an anti-capitalist politic and housing justice politic and that we work in collaboration with different partners and collectives and artists in order to produce work that that sort of furthers the goals of housing, justice, organizing and that really supports frontline tenant organizing. We sometimes write reports and good policy suggestions, but we operate in more in the sort of direct production space or the sort of more community organizing space than the sort of policy space. Yeah, and so we have chapters. We started in San Francisco, we soon, within a year or two, we were doing work in both San Francisco and Oakland because numbers of our collective lived and worked in both cities, which are very close to each other. And then a few years later, we started chapters in LA and New York. So we have these three chapters and yeah, we've had hundreds and hundreds of people become part of the collective over the years and it's been really just a pleasure to be able to work with folks and learn from each other.
Emily Holloway
So, Erin’s work with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and Lab really underscores how the social context that technology is employed in ends up influencing its product or outcomes. This is a particularly fascinating case because it brings together so many aspects of what we’ve been discussing: the relationship between property relations and technology, how speculation and finance shape the fabric of a city, and how digital tools that are held in common can be used to generate awareness and activism for radical social movements. I spoke to John Stehlin about this too, and asked him about how platforms become embedded and entangled with place.
John Stehlin
They're very novel because some of the digital aspects are very novel, but you can see a platform logic, you know again New York Stock Exchange, maybe an example. I think there's maybe a there's maybe a significant or worthwhile area to probe the difference between a platform like eBay and a platform like Uber or something because there's the location based services and the specific quality that location based services, like the difference that that makes because then you're deal with, then you're dealing with the sort of the kind of friction and messiness of like you know emplacement right, like actually being physically in one place, rather than OK, well, if you have Internet access and a post office, and like a bunch of junk, some of it might be worth something. Then you can sell things on eBay and eBay takes a cut, but that's it and maintains the data infrastructure, but that's sort of basically what eBay does. They don't themselves sell anything right? So, you can see things popping up kind of historically, right? It's the marketplace, but it's who kind of organizes and controls that marketplace, who kind of like ring fences, the access to the revenues that that marketplace generates, right. I mean, I think that there have been some, you know several people come to mind. Trevor Schultz has written about platform cooperativism, if it's cooperatively managed, right, the thing about rentierism that's so frustrating is that the rentiers don't actually do anything, right? You can analytically even separate the, say, the investment that eBay might be making in data servers and capacity right and algorithms. You can separate you know the programming side, right? That's real human labor, right? Socially necessary labor time from sort of the pure access right revenues, right, you can analytically, kind of conceptually separate those, even if in practice they're kind of jumbled up, right? Similar, you know you could do the same with Amazon. They make a ton of money off cloud servers, right? There are aspects of Amazon that are loss leaders right, and they make it up on cloud servers there's that cross-subsidy element.
Emily Holloway
So a platform doesn't necessarily have to be driven by these rentier logics. And I know this isn't exactly a part of your research, but there must be some examples of grassroots or collectively held ownership over platform infrastructures.
John Stehlin
But so yeah, in principle it you could imagine a situation in which a platform is sort of held in common right in that article with Hudson and McMeechan we I sort of identified a few at least in the transportation realm. Right. A lot of times these were sort of local alternatives to Uber, right? But I guess if you want. To kind of go back, you can think about kind of the emergence of like producer cooperatives and consumer cooperatives like IGA or something Independent Grocers Association, right? That's a kind of a it can get slippery. I get slippery, I guess where you're like, everything is a platform, right? Everything that like has a name that people use as a platform. I think you know those that kind of older cooperative tradition, right is maybe an interesting one that gives us some clues. So I think there's like, and I'm not really an expert in the sort of the cooperativism side of things. I also think that you know, lots of people have written about the way that platform logics get a little bit kind of like subverted, right? Rita Chadrick jumps to mind, where she is like looking at how it's actually sort of like collective labor and kind of collective provisioning that makes a platform like Go Jack operate in Jakarta, right? Even things like informal kind of pooling of revenues for insurance for a – sorry, Go Jack is a is a motor taxi service, right? So informally, pooling revenues so that if a driver is injured then they can their medical bills can be taken care of by the sort of the collective right. And the whole logic like drawing from people is that people are very atomized, like the shop floor is like people's individual cars. So, it's interesting that that gets subverted in particular locations where the platform really depends on people’s kind of embedded knowledge of the place, not just your ability to like follow directions on the screen. So that was kind of a whirlwind, but there's sort of the formal, I guess, to kind of put a bell on it, right? There's kind of formal efforts to create cooperative platforms that are kind of outside of the rentier logic, and then there are ways that like they get subverted and in practice used in a somewhat more kind of collective or Communitarian kind of way, that is sort of a little bit outside of the control of the platform owners themselves.
Emily Holloway
I also talked to Shannon Mattern about the role that libraries play in the city’s social infrastructure, or as a site of what she calls civic intelligence. But I also wanted to know if there were other examples in everyday places that we should also look at differently, like as the sites of an analog platform.
Shannon Mattern
Well, I love post offices. Unfortunately, we have really kind of disenfranchised our post offices. If we had thought again more capacious about what constitutes mail. The Internet, I mean the e-mail, is a form of mail that could have been under the jurisdiction of the post office, we could have had a public digital infrastructure. The post office is also sort of a hardware stores. So, one time, you know, there were a lot of post offices in hardware stores, general stores and hardware stores were the lending library, the post office in their communities. So, if we look across history, we can see a variety of examples also in some places there are public schools are open in the evening to community meetings, to town halls, to all kinds of things. So, in many cases, these institutions, again in smaller or less well-resourced cities or even kind of very socially active communities in well enfranchised parts of the world, they serve a lot of these different public institutions, serve multiple purposes. I grew up in a hardware store where there are so many interesting forms of kind of like analog, multi-generational knowledge are embodied there. So, I wrote about it and realized, I cited in a footnote the fact thinking about the hardware store really intersects productively with this burgeoning literature about maintenance studies, so there was a lot more literature in recent and recent five or six years or so about, you know, the whole maintainers network and, for instance, and my editors invited me to turn that footnote into an article. So I really reflected and realized that a lot of my work, even though I didn't maybe didn't use the term maintenance or connected to that burgeoning realm of literature was about the maintenance of social order, which is not inherently a good thing. Sometimes we have to break systems too. When the world changes and it doesn't serve them well anymore. But just like the critical challenges of maintaining and adapting and to your third point about how maintenance connected to care. I'm just looking at kind of the crossovers between the discourses about maintenance, repair, mending, care, which in some cases are those terms are prevalent in different disciplines or different kind of discourse communities. But we could think productively about how they should and could inform each other. So, if we want to maintain, a big infrastructural system, we actually also have to think about caring for the workers and the communities that supply them.
Emily Holloway
Where else do you see these issues of repair and maintenance coming up in our infrastructural or technological systems?
Shannon Mattern
I'll just give you one example. Two weeks ago or so I have some friends who were used to work for New York City public parks and then New York State parks, and now they work for the New York State Canal Corporation, which is in charge with maintaining the Erie Canal, which was a huge part of the nation's development. Industrial history is really only used for recreational purposes now, and it's very hard to maintain a 200-year-old system and they're still maintaining the locks on, you know, some sections Are 100 years old some are 200 and a lot of the pieces they worked, a lot of the machines they used to maintain the system don't exist anymore. Nobody's manufacturing this stuff. It runs on DC power, nobody makes a DC power generator anymore. So we went to some of the shops, the maintenance shops and showed that they are innovating together, systems building their own to maintain this 200-year-old infrastructure, so they're playing around with material science with various forms of really progressive forms of computational fabrication, so there this is a really beautiful example in this really shop of heavy machinery and metal shavings everywhere. Still, this innovation, to try to find ways to bring the old and the new together to maintain this system that had been for a very long time undermaintained. Well, also they were talking about how they we went to the electrical shop and they had to because, you know, there's a dearth of trades. People of trained tradespeople, electricians, plumbers, et cetera, they had recently asked to bring someone out of retirement, and I loved that it was a woman they brought out of retirement as senior electrician, to train a lot of the current people to kind of be multi -- maybe they didn't come up through the system as electricians. But to add that to their skill set or their repertoire. So really having to draw on older generations to update the knowledge or to kind of maintain a flow of a generational kind of division of labor to. Because the knowledge isn't necessarily, we're not through formal education, it's not a form of necessary knowledge, that is implanted in the current workforce.
Emily Holloway
That’s such an important point, and also an urgent one. Infrastructural and technological systems, whether they’re digital or analog, are still deeply embedded in communities filled with people who have different skills, experiences, and needs that shape how those technologies are deployed and utilized. Ryan, your work kind of touches on this too, where you look at how various organizations or officials or community groups interact with one another to shape these policies.
Ryan Burns
Like you know, a lot of the early smart city literature focused on it being a top-down exercise of power and in a lot of ways, that's descriptive or explanatory of what we see. Large multinational corporations like IBM, Cisco and so on, coming in with a package that they deliver to cities to become a smart city overnight and the flip side of that would be the government. The city governments also buying into these projects in order to better manage and control city spaces, people, flows of traffic, flows of water and resources, and so on. So that's the top-down perspective and then the bottom-up would be large, ad hoc, very unofficially organized individuals. The grassroots, so to speak, who intervene in planning processes and in city government processes to make this smart city into something that they want. Again, both of those are very true and very accurate, but they miss that little piece of the interstitial actors, what I call interstitial actors, the people and organizations who speak on behalf of other individuals, nonprofit organizations, community associations, and more strongly knit volunteer organizations that coordinate over time to intervene in city politics, and so what's important about that is that these organizations and institutions have a little bit more sway in different kinds of geographies and geographic contexts. In Alberta, for example, we have a very large number of nonprofit organizations compared with the rest of North America and so that -- because of the large presence of nonprofits in Calgary -- the city government has acknowledged this and has actively reached out to them to see what kinds of things do your constituencies need, what kinds of digital technologies could help improve your lives and so on. And so, by bringing in these organizations, these organizations are having a direct impact on how the smart city unfolds. And then there's the other part of it, which is sort of people who are interstitial to the smart city. They're on the outskirts or the margins of it. People like newcomers, youth, or elderly people, and generally people who don't use technologies the way that smart city officials want them to or expect them to. And so they exert an influence on the smart city by virtue of being left out of it.
Emily Holloway
And now your work is starting to move in a slightly different direction. Can you share some of that with our listeners?
Ryan Burns
I just had a paper come out in the Journal of Digital Geography and Society last week. That is, setting out a research agenda for thinking about the digitalized urban carbon labor nexus. What I mean by that is that if you go to the site of extraction, an oil well, for example, in 2023, you're not going to see a lot of people anymore. And this is a big change that has happened in the last 30 years or so, maybe a little bit more, where a lot of the work that is done to extract oil and gas and minerals, ores and more, is digitalized. It is extracted through digital drilling machines and automated drilling machines; it's hauled away in autonomous vehicles. The work of maintaining, managing, and monitoring those sites is done through sensors, by somebody who is very far away. Who gets all these massive streams of data from all kinds of oil wells and so on, from across a geographic region, and is charged with monitoring them. Just make sure that there's not a spill in one area, or that the autonomous vehicle hasn't malfunctioned and somewhere else, and some and so on and so on. So, what we're trying to do in this article in Digital Geography and Society is to think about what that means once energy extraction or mineral extraction, once oil and gas, mining, and well and drilling is automated and digitalized. What happens, what we're finding is that most of the labor is moving to large urban centers that are very far away, which means that there's a removal of people from the sites of extraction to cities that changes the urban labor markets, it changes the skills that are required for particular jobs. The removal of people from the site of extraction has particular implications for First Nations and indigenous communities, who are often, through things like banned corporations and tribal negotiations, service providers for those sites of extraction, they provide a lot of the infrastructure to allow that to happen. And so when you take people away from those sites of extraction, what happens to those First Nations communities? It also is changing the gender dynamics of extraction, perhaps allowing it to be a little bit more accessible to women, for example, but not necessarily, and is also changing the way we relate to Nature writ large. So this research agenda piece is trying to say, hey, here are some things we need to know in the future. And that's the first major piece to come out of this new project on digital oil and gas. The project itself is called Digitalizing Carbon Capitalism. And is about how digital technologies change extractive industries and capitalist processes writ large.
Emily Holloway
Special thanks to all of our guests: David Banks, Ryan Burns, Ayona Datta, Shannon Mattern, Erin McElroy, and John Stehlin. Listeners, you should know that we had nearly six hours of tape to fit into these four episodes. I had incredible conversations with each of our guests and was faced with the very difficult task of editing out some brilliant and fascinating commentary. So, I’d like to thank our guests again for so generously sharing their time and insights with us. Our next series, which is scheduled to be released in early November, will take a similar approach to the topic of migration and cities. Please stay tuned for a preview!
This has been UAR Remixed, a podcast by Urban Affairs Review. Special thanks to the Lindy Institute at Drexel University and the Editors at UAR. Music by Blue Dot Sessions. This show was produced and mixed by David Weems and written, hosted, and produced by me, Emily Holloway. Don’t forget to subscribe, share, and rate the show wherever you listen to podcasts. Please visit our website, urbanaffairsreview.com, for more information about the journal and the show, and sign up for our newsletter to get updates. See you next time.