Digital activism in housing struggles: Countering algorithmic violence with algorithmic care

Abstract

This review focuses on the role of digital technologies in housing activism. Housing is chosen as a site in which to highlight the activist applications of the digital for three reasons: the global housing crisis and housing's role as a key driver of inequality, housing's increasing digital mediation and the reinvigoration of tenant activism in response to the conditions created by the two preceding reasons. Focusing primarily on the area of tenant activism, I show how scholars understand the use of digital technologies in activist work in the following ways: for organising and countering digital harm, for making counter narratives visible and in the everyday work of housing advocacy. Noting that digital technologies are not without their challenges, I show how housing activists and advocates have navigated the potential extractive and discriminatory characteristics of technologies to use these same technologies in more generative ways.