Beyond the hype: Digital transformations in global land,housing,and property

Towards a critical geography of hype

Hype is closely tied to speculation. Both chart visions of the future (Bear, 2020; Powers, 2012), sharing affective and performative components that cultivate anticipation for and bring about imagined futures (Geiger and Gross, 2017; Sengers et al., 2021). Speculation is an old practice when it comes to land, enabled by what Ghertner and Lake (2021) call “land fictions,” the legal, regulatory, and narrative stories spun by investors and developers that represent land as a commodity and sustain particular types of property relations. These fictions “function as value projects that evoke and emphasize particular commodity registers of land and draw in willing subjects seeking to remake the world through the modified relationships and roles they promise to enact” (Ghertner and Lake, 2021: 17). Recent years have seen these land fictions draw on high-tech narratives to drive investment in failed or downsized projects, for example by spurring investments in the tech-enabled Masdar City project in the United Arab Emirates ¹ and “smart” cities across India (Datta, 2018; Upadhya, 2020). Beyond the intentions of tech designers or development actors, digital technologies can be adapted to amplify and accelerate speculative practices, for example when brokers turn to Facebook to flip plots and raise prices in Myanmar (Wittekind and Faxon, 2023).

Bringing theories of hype into critical geographies of land, housing, and property deepens this scholarship on land fictions and real estate speculation by highlighting some of the specific dynamics of and surrounding digital technologies. To some extent, disambiguating hype and speculation may hinge on disciplinary perspective: speculation and the speculative have been extensively theorized across geography, urban studies, social theory, and anthropology in recent years (see Bear, 2020, Komporozos-Athanasiou, 2022; Leitner et al., 2023; Summers and Fields, 2022), while hype is typically approached from media, management, or market studies (see Bourne, 2024; Geiger and Gross, 2017; Logue and Grimes, 2022; Powers, 2012). Whereas speculation is often analytically linked to financial capitalism and to real estate and development ventures (Goldman, 2011, 2020), hype is more frequently mobilized in the context of scientific and technological innovations (Bourne, 2024; Geiger and Gross, 2017; Ramiller, 2006; Funk 2019).

Hype plays a specific role in cases where emerging technologies show promise whose potential is difficult to measure (Brown and Michael, 2003; Geiger and Gross, 2017). In the face of such ambiguity, hype offers a way to build momentum and expectations, helping to “marshal resources, coordinate activities and manage uncertainty” that make it more likely the promises of new technology will be realized (Brown and Michael, 2003: 4; Geiger and Gross, 2017). However, the expectations that hype creates frequently exceed their object’s potential by amplifying and exaggerating potential gains and solutions (Ramiller, 2006). On the other hand, hype can also marginalize alternatives, understate difficulties, and elide inconvenient realities (including harms) (Ramiller, 2006). These communicative distortions function to draw attention, motivate action, distract from concerns, and ultimately to convince audiences that an innovation is achievable (Ramiller, 2006). When innovations fail to deliver on hype’s promises, disillusionment and backlash result in a crisis of value that takes the form of reduced investment or revenues, a tarnished reputation, and/or the evaporation of attention (Geiger and Gross, 2017; Powers, 2012). This cyclical aspect of hype, in which “technologies are first evangelised, then vilified, in equal measures, before being absorbed into existing markets and practices” (p. 4), can be observed in connection to numerous 21st century technological developments ranging from genetically modified foods, cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), the metaverse, and wearable ocular technology such as Google Glass (Bourne, 2024: 4).

Hype powers the Silicon Valley economy of speculative and emerging technologies. As Clea Bourne (2024) observes, the tech sector has made savvy use of a “dedicated media sphere” to promote itself as “a place of scientific discovery and entrepreneurial acumen” (p. 2). Iterative product development processes, in which innovations are often made available in beta (testing) form, make hype a constant feature of the digital economy, e.g. through successive product launches. For startups, the investment capital it draws facilitates the rapid scaling necessary to achieve network effects and “eventual winner-takes-all profits” (Pfotenhauer et al., 2022: 10). For venture capitalists, a hype-fuelled boost in a startup’s valuation trajectory allows them to maximize their cash-out potential upon the firm’s acquisition or IPO—even if hype’s inflated expectations are never realized (Cooiman, 2022). Even far from Silicon Valley, such discourses and financial connections shape what types of work and development are imagined as possible and desirable (Ames, 2019; Chan, 2013; McElroy, 2024).

In proptech, digital ‘solutions’ are inevitably accompanied by techno-utopian promises of their ground-breaking potential, messaging calculated to generate public conversation, capture attention, and ultimately to motivate economic activity (Logue and Grimes, 2022). The global Silicon Valley complex deploys hype to narrativize disruptive technologies as “both inescapable and inevitable” and to make complex challenges appear amenable to simplistic technological solutions, lending moral weight to and funnelling capital towards an inherently limited set of interventions (Guthman, 2024; Fairbairn et al., 2022; Geiger, 2019: 172). The actual impacts of digital tools are shaped by the negotiation of these promises across local contexts shaped by postcolonial property and power relations. For example, Cowan (2021) demonstrates the stickiness of paper-based property making practices and incompleteness of digitization in his account of how bureaucrats wield cadastral mapping software to commodify agrarian land and settle property claims in India. Such analyses suggest the importance of bringing diverse contexts into the frame when interrogating the promises and effects of digital technologies and the imaginaries and investments that surround them. As Julien Migozzi (2024: #) writes, “the comparative gesture is a necessary path to understand technical futures engineered in colonial pasts.” Hype is mediated by existing and unequal relations at both local and global scales.

What hype does

Hype works through crafting “highly optimistic” narratives that build interest and expectations (often of financial gains), creating a sense of novelty and urgency (Oravec, 2019: 23). Whether or not platforms deliver on their promises, these narratives, amplified through the affordances of digital tools, spur new financial and emotional investments, transforming values and ownership and even inventing new forms of land. Papers by Maalsen et al., Faxon and Wittekind, and Alvarez Leon and Rosen explore the productive power of hype when amplified through particular technologies and applied to rental housing in Australia, land sales in Myanmar, and nascent property markets in the metaverse. Across these diverse contexts, hype goes hand-in-hand with privatization, promising a quicker, better future than one ensured by the slow grind, or complete chaos, of on-the-ground regulations. These contributions underscore that different digital technologies offer different possibilities: while live videos and Virtual Reality can transport viewers or players to far-off or non-existent places to excite desire and stoke speculation, digital traces offer new possibilities for tracking tenants and extracting value. By conjuring dreams of luxury dwellings, lucrative investment opportunities or techno-utopias, diverse actors create anticipation and accelerate transactions. As brokers in Myanmar livestream land tours and tech giants in California invent scarcity to stimulate demand for virtual land, hype redirects attention away from shortcomings and limitations in order to make markets, reallocate value, and reshape land itself. This can deliver profits to some, while amplifying volatility and risk in the high stakes domain of land, housing, and property.

Sophia Maalsen, Dallas Rogers and Petra Wolifson unpack the multiple forms of value apparent within rental proptech in Australia, arguing that different forms of value are complex and relational, with contradictions and tensions stretching between them. They observe that each of these values is entangled within particular value regimes. Hype is also central here, in capturing how some values can be overplayed, or undermined by others, for example when housing’s value as home is subsumed in its status as a financial asset. Maalsen et al. frame three types of value regime. The first, common to other studies of proptech (Sadowski, 2019), is the capitalist regime, which extracts value from captured data. The second, digital care, is a new framing which explains how tech is used to help communicate between landlords and tenants in order to reduce stress, but where despite the promise, tension with the capitalist regime can undermine it. Third, techno utopian value, sees hyped tech disruptions attempt to solve non-existent problems or overclaim their ability to deliver. While promising a better future, hype is at the service of rapid growth and entrepreneurial speculation in the near-present, undermining the possibility for effective long-term change.

Hype is a key mechanism in Faxon and Wittekind’s anatomy of Myanmar’s digital land scams. While scams are endemic to capitalism, Faxon and Wittekind show how they are also amplified online and embedded in the changing form of social media itself. Facebook land sales groups, already sites of speculation that created a new, volatile, property market (Wittekind and Faxon, 2023), erupt with warnings of land scams after Myanmar’s 2021 military coup. In a period of political and economic crisis, when physically visiting plots is dangerous and the national banking system teeters on the edge of collapse, land brokers use the technological affordances of Facebook, from livestream videos to instant comment functions, to invoke sensations of scarcity, veracity, and intimacy, which encourage buyers despite known risks. While digital intimacy and authenticity establish emotional investment and interpersonal trust, the networked nature of social media land sales enables scammers to obscure responsibility if a plot or its legal documents never materialize. Hype plays on social media sites’ sensory, affective, and connective affordances to generate trust in risky land purchases, amplifying the possibilities for a scam.

While Faxon and Wittekind dub these technologically induced sensations of veracity a “virtual reality of land,” Alvarez Leon and Rosen bring us to virtual reality, literally. They examine the creation of new land in the metaverse, where platforms take the place of the state in creating, enclosing and governing space. This enables a new spatial fix, where speculative capital is deployed in the metaverse for accumulation. Assetization occurs through the selling and trading of parcels of virtual land, while rents are levied for associated services and activities that occur within the metaverse, such as with games. What is particularly notable is that beyond the laws of physics, the laws of the market remain. Channelled through technologically mediated experience and novelty, hype generates real investments. While plots do not exist physically, virtual space continues to follow capitalist imperatives and techniques for land enclosure, with distance, travel routes, barriers, and even the mirroring of real places manufacturing scarcity and driving up price.

Hype is not just a false promise, but also a productive force. In all three cases, hype motivates new forms of emotional and material investment. In contrast to the competing regimes of value or shadowy scams described above, the metaverse’s immateriality is transparent. But, as Faxon and Wittekind suggest, digital technologies can hide responsibility even as they promise “proof,” in a context marked by fear and precarity. This leads us to consider how new forms of data and digital connection might be building upon or undermining older relations of land, labor, and property, even as they obscure them.

What hype hides

Hype hides the existing and unequal relationships that shape digital transformations in global land, housing and property. Critical scholarship has already punctured industry claims that proptech will “disrupt” business as usual. This work demonstrates that new technologies have not fundamentally challenged the prevailing political economy of land and real estate; instead they often reinforce existing exclusions and benefit the powerful (Alvarez Leon and Rosen, 2020; Dal Maso et al., 2019; Fields, 2024; Lochlainn, 2023; McElroy et al., 2021; Nethercote, 2023; Safransky, 2020). Our contributions build on this work by highlighting how digital transformations in land, housing and property deepen racial, ethnic, and national exclusions within postcolonial, postsocialist, and postapartheid societies. In Cape Town’s rental housing, Jordan’s smart grid projects, New York’s housing projects and Romania’s call centers, local patterns of inequality shape the roll-out and outcomes of proptech projects. But proptech platforms and their infrastructures are also embedded within and constitutive of wider interconnected global networks, through online US property management exploiting wage differentials in Romania (McElroy), the creation of new assetized data products, which in turn, have been used to build new rental asset classes open to international investors (Migozzi), or flows of investment capital into smart metering systems, supplied and serviced by Chinese technology firms in Jordan (Kintzi). Attending to these emergent interconnections and reworked property relations on the ground is key to understanding the power of proptech.

Drawing on data from interviews as well as spatial and quantitative analysis from rental market in South Africa, Migozzi argues that rental platforms not only enable the consolidation of the sector and emergence of corporate landlords, but also extend apartheid’s extractive logic through automated tenant screening solutions that rely on credit scoring linked to colonial and apartheid racial classifications of people and neighborhoods. Platforms play to investors’ historic appetite for fine-grained information with metrics that sort the “good” tenant from the “bad.” In doing so, they assetize rental housing and create a new market in rental data while extending apartheid’s extractive logic. Migozzi (#) writes:

Previously orchestrated by the state and its local apparatus on the basis of explicit racial categories, residential sorting as shaped by the private rental sector is indexed on credit scores computed in the context of profoundly racialized indebtedness and housing wealth inequalities.

In other words, while hype over new automated solutions generates new markets in both housing and data, hype hides the renewal of profound racial inequalities. Just as algorithms can reproduce redlining in American cities (Safransky, 2020), algorithms recycle categories used to impose complete segregation under apartheid, renewing the extractive logic of racial capitalism in South Africa.

Kintzi highlights the underlying layers of colonial history and migration that shape the city and create archipelagos of (dis)connection within Jordan’s smart grid. Kintzi’s examination of Amman’s smart grid reveals the project as a productive fiction that enables investment and returns to private investors but raises questions over who builds and who benefits from new technological systems. Like the rental housing markets Migozzi describes in Cape Town, Amman’s urban geography is already structured by relations of racialized debt, as well as by contemporary categories of social differentiation, histories of Ottoman and British land policy, and colonial and post-colonial waves of dispossession across the Levant. Moving from gated compounds to refugee shelters, Kintzi brings intimate attention to the ways in which older structures of exclusion intersect with attempts at a data-driven energy solutions, and how these are experienced in everyday life. Smart energy transition is shaped by postcolonial property relations, as smart meters are embedded in the existing built environment, already infrastructured with analogue solutions to financial precarity, legal informality, and blasting heat.

A key promise of proptech is that of efficiency and ease: digital technologies are supposed to facilitate a free market and reduce the drudgery of actually owning or inhabiting a home. Yet, as McElroy shows, the “frictionless” life hyped in dominant “fictions of AI and fantasies of automation” occludes the myriad, sometimes dehumanizing, labor of proptech. Bringing feminist scholarship on digital labor into conversation with geographies of property technologies, McElroy demonstrates how landlord tech does not automate or ease, but rather makes more work for tenants and employees. This is true for tenants in New York’s affordable housing complexes, especially tenants of color who have to contort their bodies to be recognized by scanners and older residents who struggle without smartphone apps, as well as for workers in digitized service work in the US or outsourced call centers in Romania for virtual property management firms. As new technologies, platforms and data infrastructures unfold, they span new connections as they stretch and enrol artefacts with actors across space. McElroy’s work draws attention to these new digital geographies of exploitation that connect disparate sites.

Conclusion

By examining the political and material transformations occurring because, alongside, and in spite of new technologies, this theme issue pushes toward empirical investigations and new theorizations of digital land, housing, and property. Although proptech hype often stresses a universal potential for disruption, the underlying markets, their actors and dynamics, and the physical structures and terrain in question remain locally grounded. Drawn from diverse geographies, these studies cover a range of technologies that both enter the home and mediate access to it, from credit scoring data to digital butlers, from VR headsets to smart energy meters. The types of land, housing, and property the authors examine are similarly diverse: from rural plots marketed as ripe for development in Myanmar to affordable housing complexes in lower Manhattan. Across the papers, hype elides unequal relations of land and labor while stoking speculation in immovable property and creating new markets for less tangible assets—whether rental data or virtual plots.

While claims of ground-breaking novelty, spectacular opportunity and hyper-efficiency are familiar, our contributors assist us in scratching away the smooth veneer of marketing gloss. For example, Kintzi demonstrates that the benefits promised by the smart energy grid are meaningless to refugees who are actively disconnected from the system, while McElroy’s work shatters the fantasies of frictionless living through proptech. Maalsen et al. reveal how techno utopian platforms fail to deliver on their promised solutions as their social and economic values undermine each other, while Migozzi observes how the celebrated ‘objective’ and neutral values behind automated scoring are anything but, instead compounding racial inequalities. Even in the potential freedom of the metaverse, where space can literally defy the laws of physics, constraints emerge through the imposition of capitalist values borrowed from existing land markets, for the benefit of platforms (Alvarez Leon and Rosen). But our contributors also show that digital tools are remaking land, housing, and property, if not necessarily in promised or predictable ways. In Myanmar, land scams are amplified by the sensation of veracity generated through live videos and the networked immediacy of social media sites. Tech platforms invent virtual land as a commodity in the metaverse, while rental platforms create a new asset to sell internationally from South Africa. Meanwhile, digital tools forge new connections, such as between call centers in Romania and luxury apartments in the US.

“Beyond the hype” is an invitation for more critical, creative, and comparative examination as to how proptech reshapes the politics and practices of ownership, development, and dwelling globally. As we have assembled this collection, the inescapable hype around “AI,” a label that in itself warrants critical investigation (Suchman, 2023), has raised new questions for the real estate sector. The actual effects of these and other innovations will be shaped by new regulations, such as a total ban on Airbnb and other short-term rentals in Barcelona designed to address the city’s housing crisis. ² As digital innovations and the hype that surrounds them continue to drive material investments and saturate everyday life, we encourage close attention to particular types of technologies and to their relationships with existing legal regimes, market dynamics, and land politics. We also urge greater scrutiny of the dynamics being reinforced and new assets being created by digitization, as well as the emerging global geographies that connect disparate places.