News & Events: Lunch Lecture: April Lunch Lecture: Digital experiments with landed property - Robots, race, and rent (15 April 2026)
The second Lunch Lecture of the three-part series of this spring semester takes place on 15 April. 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, Feb 10, 2026
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. She 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 takes place online on 15 April 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.