Transition to blockchain undergirded by white settler colonial constructs

In the same way that crypto-proponents are buying up beachfront property in Puerto Rico, contributing to rising real estate prices and threatening to push existing residents out, the financialization of housing and land has “colonized cities by provoking dispossession and homelessness” (Rolnik, 2019). More broadly, private property ownership has been conceptualized as a white settler colonial construct tied to violence and dispossession of land from Indigenous populations (King, 2019). Bhandar has established how private property and racial subjects are co-produced in ongoing “racial regimes of property” (2018). Dorries (2022) further argues that racial property regimes are reinforced in mainstream planning logics and poses a critical provocation – what is planning without property? Engaging this trajectory of thought, I raise the reverse question – via DLTs and other digital tools – what is property without planning? I suggest that certain digital technologies are used to encode or perpetuate the private property regime outside of mainstream planning structures, and yet DLTs are being used in fewer cases to experiment and imagine more equitable modes of living. More research on land based distributed ledger projects and digital real estate experiments (along with their racial/gendered implications) is needed.

Even for projects that claim to seek justice and emancipation via blockchains, a form of “settler normalcy” (Tuck and Yang, 2012) makes it hard to envision actionable alternatives outside of the capitalist status quo. While distributed ledgers may open up experimentation with land and property to those outside of mainstream planning discipline, this does not mean such experimentation will inherently be more just or decolonial. Decolonial design strategies necessarily rethink the concept of private ownership and might explore commoning and cooperative practices, collectivism, and multi-species land stewardship (TallBear, 2017; Bresnihan, 2016; Tsing, 2015; Sundberg, 2014). If distributed ledgers are to support the interests of justice, one might first question, as Dorries (2022) poses, “what forms of praxis and modes of relationality […] will best support the ethical flourishing of life?” – and are certain technological configurations compatible?

Research in housing studies and urban policy has also established the need for more equitable housing models, policies, and protocols. This need has been exacerbated since the 2008 financial crisis and ongoing international housing crisis, which as Fields and Hodkinson (2017) describe, is an “enduring state of affairs in which rising evictions, overcrowding, unaffordability, substandard conditions, homelessness, and displacement have become the norm.” The commodification of land and property in service to capital accumulation for transnational housing investors, developers, landlords, sovereign wealth funds, real estate investment trusts, and other non-occupying purchasers has largely been prioritized over housing as a human right (Aalbers and Christophers, 2014; Marcuse and Madden, 2016). Even state-sponsored policies that consider housing as a human right get subsumed by continued neoliberal private–public partnerships and “market friendly” solutions which have been shown to entrench existing housing inequalities (Wetzstein, 2017). Contemporary “urban revitalization” projects are often posed as means for economic development in vulnerable geographies, where investors acquire and exploit devalued public housing and land from indebted city governments, real estate prices increase, leading to gentrification and displacement of low-income households from what becomes deemed a higher value area (Slater, 2017). Accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2003: 148, 158, 184) is also witnessed in the vulture capital behavior of “global capital landlords” and private equity firms who prey on low-income residents defaulting on their mortgages by buying up repossessed homes and loan books from struggling banks (Fields and Raymond, 2021).

Just as racial colonial subjects are co-produced with private property (Bhandar, 2018), venture capital tends to operationalize crises using rhetoric of social good, leveraging fragile geographies as test-beds, and framing citizens as future consumers (Howson, 2020). Aside from Puerto Rico, in Latin America, countries like El Salvador are running grand crypto-economic experiments such as Bitcoin Beach and Bitcoin City (Vázquez, 2022). While digital literacy training often accompanies these projects, including a workshop in Puerto Rico entitled “bootstrapping your own inclusion”, this education is usually guided under the terms and priorities of outside blockchain companies rather than through self-initiated efforts of self-determination. Increasingly, however, Puerto Rican tech developers are looking to leverage the blockchain buzz to implement projects by and for Puerto Ricans (LinkPR, 2022).