Abstract
ABSTRACT The eruption of disruptive digital platforms is reshaping geographies of housing under the gaze of corporations and through the webs of algorithms. Engaging with interdisciplinary scholarship on informal housing across the Global North and South, we propose the term ‘digital informalisation’ to examine how digital platforms are engendering new and opaque ways of governing housing, presenting a theoretical and political blind spot. Focusing on rental housing, our paper unpacks the ways in which new forms of digital management of risk control access and filter populations. In contrast to progressive imaginaries of ‘smart’ technological mediation, practices of algorithmic redlining, biased tenant profiling and the management of risk in private tenancies and in housing welfare both introduce and extend discriminatory and exclusionary housing practices. The paper aims to contribute to research on informal housing in the Global North by examining digital mediation and its governance as key overlooked components of housing geographies beyond North and South dichotomies.
Highlights
In the sci-fi novella Unauthorised Bread by Cory Doctorow, the protagonist Salima lives in social rented housing in an anonymous metropolis of the Global North
In stark contrast to the developmental imaginaries of both ‘Global North’ technological innovation and smart urbanism, we argue that digital platforms and Platform Real Estate are enabling the expansion of informality within the housing sector
We introduced the concept of ‘digital informalisation’ to better understand and study the effects of platforms on everyday activities
Summary
In the sci-fi novella Unauthorised Bread by Cory Doctorow, the protagonist Salima lives in social rented housing in an anonymous metropolis of the Global North. These emerging practices are pushing scholars to argue for the expansion of housing scholarship to ‘“not for housing” houses’ (Doling & Ronald, 2019), and their relationship to prevailing institutional rules and legal frameworks As this intervention notes, there is a need to expand beyond analyses of space and structure to consider novel forms of governance and issues of access, the management of risk in tenancies and the long-term implications of digital and algorithmic mediation, in both private and public sectors. In the partial suspension of regulations by the state, technological ‘innovations’ borrowed from corporate management are introduced in ever greater areas of governance, including housing, testing the boundaries of the rule of law (Harris, 2020) In this case, the politics of algorithmic world-making appear to be profoundly reshaping the role of central and local governments, creating systems where it is acceptable, in order to reduce the ‘risk’ posed by ‘improper’ bodies, to suspend or to render impossible to implement those same state regulations designed to ensure equality and protect the most vulnerable inhabitants
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