Platform Financial Subjectivities, by Desiree Fields (UC Berkeley)

Desiree Fields is an Associate Professor of Geography where she is also a faculty affiliate with Global Metropolitan Studies and the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative. She also co-lead an interdisciplinary research group concerned with digital transformations in global land, housing, and property. Fields is a critical economic geographer and urban scholar. Her research, teaching, and public scholarship investigate property, finance, and technology with a focus on how they reproduce social and spatial hierarchies in the United States. At its core, her work is about how these processes of economic and technological change unevenly restructure urban space and the social relations of land and housing. She is currently working on two projects that extend her longstanding research on housing financialization and what she terms the “automated landlord’. Building on her earlier work on finance and subjectivity, the first project examines digital platforms that facilitate real estate investment by ordinary people. Such platforms are a key site where financial subjectivities and individual capital become algorithmically networked to wider capitalist dynamics, within and beyond housing markets. Whereas investment platforms frame themselves in terms of democratization, ordinary investors are pursuing financial agency in an environment of automation, stratification of users, and shifting digital and financial architectures. Seeking financial freedom, users construct their sense of proper financial subjectivity, struggling with and constrained by the platform’s own terms. The second project investigates how digital capitalists are increasingly attempting urban-scale experiments that seek to build entire cities ‘from scratch’ in rural landscapes as a way out of existing urban problems. Where her recent work has focused on how technology is being mobilized to reconfigure property relations and housing markets, this project is concerned with how capital accumulated by digital capitalists is being mobilized to transform space at the scale of the settlement. This research interrogates the political economic experiments that are part of such efforts to profoundly rearrange space, and explores the conflicting visions of value, productivity, and nature involved in the blank slate urbanism of digital capitalists. Fields is a former fellow of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study at the University of Uppsala, Sweden. Prior to UC Berkeley, she was a lecturer in the Department of Geography at the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Queens College of the City University of New York. She earned her PhD in Environmental Psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Beyond UC Berkeley, she is an editor at Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space as well as Housing, Theory and Society. She is also a trustee of the Urban Studies Foundation.