December 20, 2024
#21: Introducing a New Collection on Digital Transformations in Global Land, Housing, and Property
Hype is ubiquitous in today’s tech sector, where new digital devices are seen as a panacea to squeeze ever greater returns from real estate markets. But how are digital tools actually remaking property relations around the world? In this short post, Hilary Faxon, Desiree Fields, and Thomas Wainwright introduce a new theme issue, just published in Environment and Planning D: Society & Space, that investigates how digital innovations are changing the nature and value of land and housing across both country and city.
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Introducing “AgroVerse”: Ignite Your Agricultural Adventure in the Heart of Indonesia’s Farmlands!
Are you ready to embark on the ultimate farming odyssey and unleash your inner agrarian pioneer? Prepare for an adrenaline-fueled journey into the lush, vibrant landscapes of Indonesia with AgroVerse – the groundbreaking proptech platform that doesn’t just offer farmland investment; it delivers an agricultural revolution!
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🌏 Global Impact, Local Roots: Make a difference on a global scale while staying grounded in local communities and cultures with AgroVerse’s unique blend of global vision and local engagement! By investing in Indonesian farmland, you’re not just growing crops – you’re nurturing livelihoods, fostering economic growth, and creating sustainable futures for generations to come.
🔥 Fuel Your Passion for Farming: Ignite your passion for farming and immerse yourself in the exhilarating world of agriculture with AgroVerse’s immersive virtual experiences and community-driven initiatives! Connect with fellow farmers, share knowledge, and embark on collaborative projects that fuel your passion, inspire innovation, and ignite the flames of agricultural adventure.
🤝 Partnership & Collaboration: Join forces with industry leaders, agricultural experts, and local stakeholders to create a powerful network of innovation and collaboration with AgroVerse! Our platform facilitates strategic partnerships, joint ventures, and co-creation opportunities that amplify your impact, accelerate your growth, and drive collective success in the world of farming.
🌟 Unleash Your Agricultural Adventure: Are you ready to soar to new heights, break through barriers, and unleash your agricultural adventure in the heart of Indonesia’s farmlands? Join the AgroVerse revolution today and become a trailblazer in the world of farming – because in AgroVerse, the sky’s the limit, and your farming journey awaits!
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Hype like this—a pitch generated by ChatGPT with our prompts—is increasingly ubiquitous in the burgeoning proptech ecosystem. The neologism “proptech”
[1] [2] indicates assemblages of artefacts and knowledge that automate and reorganise the land and property sectors with techniques such as artificial intelligence and algorithms, usually for profit. Our fabricated example illustrates the ease with which new proptech pitches and proposed business models are rapidly and speculatively assembled by entrepreneurs to attract venture capital and media attention. Despite claims of innovation and novelty, the pitches often follow similar models, narratives and patterns, perhaps which makes it so easy for a large language model to recreate.
Despite the wave of hype, digital transformations are not merely the stuff of tech bro dreams. They have performative qualities that generate material effects on the price of land, the cost of housing, and the important, yet seemingly mundane realities of day-to-day life. As
recent contributions to
Institutional Landscapes show, digital tools are facilitating farmland investment. A growing body of work explores the how the booming AgTech sector, complete with performative pitches, silver bullet solutions, and promises of overcoming unpredictability and providing reliable income streams, leverages hype around digital transformations to encourage investment, both in farmland itself and in an array of ancillary products and services
[3] [4] [5] [6].
A new collection, out now at
Environment & Planning D, investigates how 21
st century digital innovations are changing the development and commodification of land, housing, and property globally. One of our goals in assembling the theme issue was to bring together scholars working in urban and rural landscapes. In doing so, we respond to calls to bring together work on urban housing and rural land to understand key dynamics in relational geographies of real property
[7]. While “proptech” has usually been applied to housing and “agtech” focused on food systems, our collection starts from the premise that digitization, and the hype surrounding it, is a key vector of transformation in the value and meaning of real property across both city and countryside.
In the issue’s
introduction, we draw on the understudied notion of hype as an analytic entry point to interrogate these shifts
[8]. Hype is closely tied to the age old practice of land speculation, enabled by what Ghertner and Lake call “land fictions,” the legal, regulatory, and narrative stories spun by investors and developers that represent land as a commodity and sustain particular types of property relations
[9]. More generally hype is also an essential part of capitalist political economy, but it is arguably the engine driving Silicon Valley’s economy of speculative and emerging technologies. These technologies follow trajectories of ‘boom and bust’, moving from initial technological breakthrough to overinflated, exaggerated claims, to disillusionment. The ‘winners’ are often quietly absorbed into existing tech behemoths and boring product channels, with little fanfare. The stakes of these volatile hype cycles are particularly high in the case of land and housing, not only because these places serve as a basis for human life, but also because digital futures are stubbornly tied to landed property, for instance through the geospatial technologies underpinning digital capitalism
[10] and state power
[11].
As exemplified in the ChatGPT pitch above, hype produces communicative distortions
[12]. On the one hand, distortions amplify and exaggerate, as indicated by the invitation to “dive headfirst into a world of endless possibilities where every acre holds the potential for greatness” and the promise that “AgroVerse offers the tools, resources, and support you need to turn your agricultural aspirations into astronomical returns.” On the other hand, distortions marginalize, understate, and elide. For example, Agroverse’s pitch frames potential revenue from farmland investment as the solution to global environmental and social issues, declaring that, “By investing in Indonesian farmland, you’re not just growing crops – you’re nurturing livelihoods, fostering economic growth, and creating sustainable futures for generations to come”. In other words, hype works by inflating the promises of technological transformation to encourage new forms of emotional and material investment. At the same time, hype hides the existing and unequal relationships of land, labor, and property that shape digital transformations in particular geographies.
Contributions in our collection showcase what hype does and what hype hides in South Africa, Jordan, Romania, Australia, New York City, Myanmar and the metaverse. Papers investigate the productive power of hype when amplified through particular technologies and applied to
rental housing in Australia [13],
rural land sales in Myanmar [14], and
nascent property markets in the metaverse [15]. Hype goes hand-in-hand with privatization across these diverse sites, but different digital technologies offer different possibilities: while live videos and Virtual Reality can transport players to simulate scarcity and stoke speculation, digital traces enable tracking tenants to surveil behaviour and extract value. Hype redirects attention away from shortcomings and limitations in order to make new markets, reallocate value, and reshape land itself, delivering profits and power to some, while amplifying volatility and risk. Hype is not just a false promise, but also a productive force.
Critical scholarship has already dismissed industry claims that proptech will “disrupt” business as usual. Instead, new technologies frequently reinforce existing exclusions and benefit powerful actors in real estate markets
[16] [17]. Our contributions build on this work by highlighting how digital transformations in land, housing and property deepen racial, ethnic, and national exclusions within postcolonial, postsocialist, and postapartheid societies. From
Cape Town’s rental housing [18], to
Jordan’s smart grid projects [19],
New York’s housing projects and Romania’s call centers [20], local patterns of inequality shape the roll-out and outcomes of proptech projects.
Proptech platforms are also embedded within wider networks, whether through Chinese investments in Jordan’s smartgrid or South African rental data, assetized and sold abroad. Uncovering these emergent interconnections and reworked relations is key to understanding the power of proptech. “Beyond the hype” is an urgent call for more critical, creative, and comparative examination as to how digital technologies are reshaping the geographies of real property, as well as the everyday politics and practices of land and housing. We hope you enjoy the collection.
[1] Fields D and Rogers D (2021) Towards a Critical Housing Studies Research Agenda on Platform Real Estate. Housing, Theory and Society 38(1): 72–94.
[2] Shaw J (2020) Platform Real Estate: theory and practice of new urban real estate markets. Urban Geography 41(8): 1037–1064.
[3] Gugganig M, Burch KA, Guthman J, Bronson K (2023) Contested agri-food futures: Introduction to the Special Issue. Agriculture and Human Values 40(3): 787-798.
[4] Fairbairn M, Kish Z and Guthman J (2022) Pitching agri-food tech: performativity and non-disruptive disruption in Silicon Valley. Journal of Cultural Economy 15(5): 652-670.
[5] Guthman J (2024) The Problem with Solutions: Why Silicon Valley can’t hack the future of food. Berkeley: University of California Press.
[6] Sippel SR (2023) Tackling land’s ‘stubborn materiality’: the interplay of imaginaries, data and digital technologies within farmland assetization. Agriculture and Human Values 40: 849-863.
[7] Van Sant L, Shelton T, Kay K (2023) Connecting country and city: The multiple geographies of real property ownership in the US. Geography Compass. 17:e12677.
[8] Faxon HO, Fields D, Wainwright T (2024) Beyond the Hype: digital transformations in global land, housing and property. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 42(4).
[9] Ghertner DA and Lake RW (2021) Land Fictions: The Commodification of Land in City and Country. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
[10] Alvarez Leon L F (2024) The Map in the Machine: Charting the Spatial Architecture of Digital Capitalism. Berkeley: University of California Press.
[11] Faxon HO, Goldstein JE, Fisher MR and Hunt G (2022) Territorializing spatial data: Controlling land through One Map projects in Indonesia and Myanmar. Political Geography 98: 102651.
[12] Ramiller NC (2006) Hype! Toward a Theory of Exaggeration in Information Technology Innovation. Academy of Management Proceedings 2006(1): A1-A6
[13] Maalsen S, Rogers D and Wolifson P (2024) The social lives of rental proptech: Entanglements between capitalist, care and techno-utopian values. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 42(4).
[14] Faxon HO and Wittekind CT (2023) Livestreamed land: Scams and certainty in Myanmar’s digital land market. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 42(4).
[15] Alvarez Leon L F and Rosen J (2024) Land, Reconfigured: Defying the Laws of Physics, Upholding the Rules of the Market in the Metaverse. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 42(4).
[16] Safransky S (2020) Geographies of Algorithmic Violence: Redlining the Smart City. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 44(2): 200–218.
[17] McElroy E and Vergerio M (2022) Automating gentrification: Landlord technologies and housing justice organizing in New York City homes. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 40(4): 607-626.
[18] Migozzi J (2023) The good, the bad and the tenant: Rental platforms renewing racial capitalism in the post-apartheid housing market. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 42(4).
[19] Kintzi K (2023) The smart grid archipelago: Infrastructures of networked (dis)connectivity in Amman. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 42(4).
[20] McElroy E (2024) The work of landlord technology: The fictions of frictionless property management. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 42(4).