News & Events: Lunch Lecture: October Lunch Lecture: Digital experiments with landed property - Robots, race, and rent (22 October 2025)
The first Lunch Lecture of the three-part series of this fall semester will take place on 22 October. Dr. Desiree Fields from the University of California, Berkeley will discuss digital experiments with landed property, including the topics of robots, race, and rent.
By Responsible City Team on Tue, Sep 16, 2025
A wide range of digital innovations has changed property relations globally over the past fifteen years. What are we to make of these digital experiments with landed property? Their technological novelty does not break with the geographic and historical specificities of property relations: technological progress has long been fundamental to how relationships to land are constituted and reconstituted according to dominant interests. In this talk, Dr. Desiree Fields situates 21st century housing market technologies within sedimented relations of landed property in the United States to show how property innovation in the US has furthered racialized wealth accumulation and dispossession. Dr. Desiree Fields interprets current anxieties about “robot landlords” as anxieties about how the shifting landscape of property ownership appears to threaten the economic benefits associated with racial dominance.
The event will take place online on 22 October from 16:00 to 17:00 CET and can be attended via this Zoom link. More information on the Lunch Lecture series can be obtained from the flyer below.