Fall 2023
Architecture of Real Estate. Technology, Land, Housing: Histories of Commodification

Gunther's Chain, Illustration.

In his essay "Do Artefacts Have Politics?" Langdon Winner pointed out that "the things we call 'technologies' are ways of building order in our world," positioning them as inherently political tools that shape our understanding of and being in the world. As such, history of technology is also intimately intertwined with the history of property relations, with different technological inventions playing a crucial role in commodification of land and housing. Starting already from the 17th century England and the invention of the Gunther's Chain—the first precise and standardized tool for land surveying (Shaw, 2019), or emergence of cadastral mapping as a form of Enlightenment's nation states' political and economic control over documenting, managing, and securing private ownership of land (Pickles, 2004) technological innovation has served the imperative of the market, helping 'rationalisation' and thus easier trade of land. The intense technological development during the 19th century industrialisation, which saw a number of inventions, has changed the construction paradigm. Among them—the invention of the car and the elevator, to give just some examples—allowed for the spread of private property units of land and housing to spread both horizontally: across the territory, with the rapid growth of the cities and emergence of suburbia (Hayden, 2004) and vertically, into the air, with the construction of skyscrapers (Bernard, 2014). The digitisation of marketplaces, the development of property management software, networks, platforms, and digital technologies, throughout 20th and 21st century, facilitated real estate trade, allowing for its globalisation at the same time spurring commodification of the built environment even further.

Starting from here, this seminar will critically unfold the history of technological development and invention in relation to the changing property regimes. Organised around five tools of embodied power of technology to enable ways of seeing, and thus also ways of enabling ideologies of private ownership in the world—measure, map, infrastructure, platform, algorithm, and software—the seminar will unpack the histories of collaboration of technology, finance, law, and state power in shaping the contemporary built environment as we know it today.