| Description | On the Work of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project: Visualizing Displacement in the Wake of the Tech Boom 2.0
Erin McElroy
Doctoral Candidate, Feminist Studies, UCSC; Co-founder, AEMP Since the emergence of Silicon Valley’s Tech Boom 2.0, the San Francisco Bay Area has endured rapid restructuring of property value. As rental and home prices have skyrocketed, so have eviction rates, disproportionately leading to the dispossession of racialized poor and working-class tenants in San Francisco, Oakland, and other Bay Area urban spaces. The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project - a data visualization, data analysis, and cartographic narrative collective - arose to provide documentation and analysis of the eviction crisis, working alongside (rather than for) impacted communities, activist groups, and housing justice coalitions. In the tradition of feminist science studies and counter-cartography, and in active engagement with decolonial methodology and intersectional politics, the AEMP has created over 100 digital cartographic and media arts pieces, utilizing multiple data sets of various genres. From correlative and causal maps that uncover links between real estate speculators and tech venture capital, to oral history and community power maps of loss and resistance, the project endeavors to collaboratively produce data useful to movement building. Aspiring towards futures in which entanglements between real estate, luxury development, tech corporations, and government cease to be the modus operandi of residential placement and displacement, the AEMP also dreams of futures in which digital technologies are liberated from capital itself. In this talk, AEMP cofounder Erin McElroy will elaborate upon the project and its visions while also highlighting numerous AEMP maps and media pieces that detail the contemporary contours of Bay Area gentrification. |
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