Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

RJ Koscielniak, Eastern Michigan University

; ,

Description:

Recent critical attention on eviction and speculation has illustrated the economies responsible for undermining housing security and neighborhood stability (Seymour & Akers, 2021). Likewise, renewed examinations of vacant property and demolition suggest a wide-range of real estate and property practices that extract value from land by coordinating predatory and rentier relationships across sectors (Koscielniak, 2021; Purifoy & Seamster, 2021; Zaimi, 2021). Rather than isolated or opportunistic actions by individual actors or firms, entire industries and economies emerge that intertwine material, technical, and financial processes to debase land-uses and strip properties of remaining value (Seymour, 2020). By drawing on this work, the production of decline perspective has scrutinized “gentrification” as a catch-all category for indexing dispossessive or extractive urban transformation. This scholarship has described the ways capitalist urbanization in declining cities and regions reinforces anti-Black and anti-poor geographies by depending on property practices that extract value without serving as a precondition to redevelopment or land-use intensification (Akers & Seymour, 2018).

This AAG 2022 paper session builds upon that existing analysis by prioritizing the materials, logistics, and industries involved in the extraction of value and the production of decline. We encourage submissions that mobilize the production of decline perspective to identify and interpret the operations of capital at the local, state, national, and global scale. Papers should engage with how supply chains, real estate practices, and public policy interact and extend across the built environment. We are interested in nascent or established economies – resource extraction, eviction, speculation, landlording, demolition, landscaping, sanitation, waste disposal, towing - that exploit declining cities and how those economies are entangled in spatial and political networks that reproduce instability, reward disinvestment, and enable destruction. Papers should address the material and physical dimensions of these processes, illuminating the forms of production and value chains that commodify the inputs and outputs in the process of regional and urban decline.

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda