Live Stream: Recommoning Territory – Diversifying Housing Tenure with Platform Cooperatives
- This event has passed.
Affordability Index Dashboard, in development by DOMA and the Centre for Spatial Technologies. Commissioned by 221A
Maksym Rokmaniko of DOMA, a Blockchains & Cultural Padlocks partner and current 221A Fellow, will address their platform’s potential to inspire a cooperative housing model at scale: people getting together to achieve a common goal and sharing the value that’s collectively generated. DOMA, envisions a smart commons where people can pool their resources to raise their collective power, while lowering the cost and barriers to membership for the services and products associated with home. Developed in anticipation of blockchain technology’s broader adoption, DOMA offers a flexible, secure and transparent model for the many to have their stake in the city.
The live stream welcomes Maral Sotoudehnia (University of Victoria), a critical geographer and researcher on the BACP initiative who authored the research paper “Encrypting Enclosures.” This comparative study looks at the emergence of applications for fractionalized real estate with blockchain technology, and how they confound dominant understandings of property and global real estate flows. Also joining the discussion is Andy Yan, Director of The City Program at Simon Fraser University, who consulted on the research process behind DOMA’s planning for the Lower Mainland. Yan will speak to his new research on the informal secondary market for rental housing, which is estimated to be over 50 percent of the rental market in the Metro Vancouver region. And, Ian Spangler, a Geographer and PhD candidate at the University of Kentucky, who is asking the question: how do new technologies for the management, transaction, surveyance and surveillance of real estate transform how we come to own the earth—and, perhaps more importantly, who gets to own it?
As a 221A Fellow, DOMA has been developing a closer study of the Lower Mainland of British Columbia’s housing market, in partnership with the Centre for Spatial Technologies (Kyiv). Together, they are creating a digital dashboard with a rich array of interrelated data sets, modeling an affordability index and platform narrative for DOMA. This research provides insights towards the methods we can collectively leverage to shift the housing tenure of the city, diversifying the centuries-long monoculture of over-squeezed rentership, and indebted home ownership.
Accessibility note: Live captioning will be provided during the event. A full transcript and recording will be published in the days following.
Blockchains & Cultural Padlocks Research Report, published by 221A, May 2021
Contributors
- Maksym Rokmaniko is an architect, designer, and entrepreneur. His research and design work explores new forms of urban living enabled by emerging technologies. He is the founder of the architectural practice Anarchitects (Kiev), a partner at The Center for Spatial Technologies (Kiev) and the project lead at DOMA (Paris/Kiev), a networked-ownership housing platform for the token economy.
- Maral Sotoudehnia is a Ph.D. Candidate in the University of Victoria’s Department of Geography. Her research investigates the cultural politics and commodification of digital and urban spaces shaped by global policies, peer-to-peer systems, and smart technologies. Equally influencing her scholarship are contemporary approaches to critical data studies, feminist political economy, and new materialist scholars that foreground questions surrounding access, citizenship, embodiment, financial exclusion, social justice, and subject/ivities in relation to multi-scalar decision-making processes. Her doctoral research project, supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, traces an ethnography of contemporary life under distributed but rambunctious instances of capitalism generated by blockchains and cryptocurrency markets.
- Ian Spangler is a geographer, writer, and cartographer. He completed his undergraduate studied in Geography and Creative Writing at the University of Mary Washington (Fredericksburg), and his graduate studies were pursued in Geography at the University of Kentucky (Lexington), with a focus on gentrification, emotional labor, and short-term rentals in New Orleans. Spangler is currently a PhD Candidate at the University of Kentucky, and his dissertation work explores the spatialization of digital real estate platforms. He's asking the question, how do new technologies for the management, transaction, surveyance and surveillance of real estate transform how we come to own the earth—and, perhaps more importantly, who gets to own it?
- Andy Yan is director of Simon Fraser University's City Program. He has extensively worked in the non-profit and private urban planning sectors with projects in the metropolitan regions of Vancouver, San Francisco, New York City, Los Angeles, and New Orleans. He specializes in the fields of urban regeneration, applied demographics, geographic information systems, neighborhood development, public outreach, social media, and quantitative research. Andy holds a master’s in urban planning from the University of California – Los Angeles and a bachelor of arts with first class honours distinctions in geography and political science from Simon Fraser University. He is a registered professional planner with the Canadian Institute of Planners and a certified geographic information systems professional. Andy is also an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia’s School of Regional and Community Planning as well as an affiliate with the Master’s of Urban Design Program of UBC’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. He has been a visiting scholar at New York University’s Asian/Pacific/American Studies Institute (2002-2003, 2015-2016) as well as a visiting scholar at SFU’s Institute of Governance. He serves on the board of directors for the Downtown Eastside Neighborhood House and the David Suzuki Foundation’s Climate Council, and he previously sat on the City of Vancouver’s Planning Commission.
Acknowledgements
Supported by the Canada Council for the Art’s Digital Strategy Fund
Unceded Territory
221A acknowledges that the area called Vancouver is within the unceded Indigenous territories belonging to the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. 221A recognizes that the colony of British Columbia was created through organized dispossession and colonial violence. 221A seeks to shift its organizational practices to work together with Indigenous people to end ongoing violence, dispossession and displacement.