Speculating on vacancy

Abstract

Property speculation has long served a role in the settler colonial appropriation of land and the racialised uneven development of contemporary cities. This future‐oriented approach to property acquisition and management is underpinned by notions of vacancy that erase past and present forms of possession and associate racialised spaces with lack and risk. Efforts to define, represent, and manage the speculative value of “vacant” properties through predictive mapping work to colonise the future in ways that erase the present and past. In this paper, I reflect on the role of speculative cartographies of property in both reifying and undermining normative urban property regimes. Specifically, I examine the city of Philadelphia’s use of cartographic tools to identify “likely” property vacancy and how they relate to ongoing racialised dispossession. I then turn to consider the potential of speculative (counter) cartographies of property to contribute to new political realities, not just prevailing geographies. To do so, I engage with the work of artists and activists who are using mapmaking grounded in Afrofuturism to reclaim and reimagine the space‐times of properties deemed by city officials and developers to be “empty” or “wasted.” I suggest that while speculative cartographies of property facilitate the consolidation of liberal property regimes, they also allow for their disruption by revealing their situatedness and contingency – and by facilitating alternative visions of urban futures.

Finding Satoyama – Forest bathing as a creative practice of knowledge creation and healing in/with/through damaged landscapes

“…https://ecohumanism.co.uk/joe/ Noterman, 2022). Debates about rewilding and giving land back to nonhuman nature is part of the political act of eco-citizenship.…”

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“…The (de)valuation of some of land and culture is reliant on assembling boundary devices to render land investible – classified, for example, as Tanya Murray Li (2014: 592) argues, on ‘“underutilised” or frontier land, or sometimes as marginal, idle or waste land’ – often despite peoples past, present or future claims to be there. Density propositions can work to make land investable by ensuring that it becomes vacant, or terra nullis (Noterman, 2021) – as Murray Li (2014: 592) writes, ‘empty of people histories and claims but full of potential of new and improved use’. The making and politics of value in relation to density, then, entails an expansive spatial and temporal process connecting land, built environment, capital, social reproduction, and culture.…”

“…Key actors in this domain include real estate firms, developers, builders, different forms of investment capital, and supportive state authorities, as well as individuals through financial methods such as mortgage investments. Value here can work to colonise future land use through racialised capitalism, expropriation and dispossession (Pulido, 2016; Noterman, 2021).…”

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