Recoding Urban Property: the Politics of a Glitch Commons in a Digital Urban Age.

Over the past decade there has been a wave of digital experimentation explicitly aimed at securing the extended assetization of urban land and commercialisation of real estate data. In the large urban economies of the global South the charge toward property’s digital assetization is being led by new a configuration of state actors and a burgeoning global property technology, or ‘Proptech’ industry. Utilising new property technologies – the drone, platform, algorithm – the state has aggressively sought to reorganise urban lifeworlds into both bankable land assets, and clusters of disaggregated data-points that can be sorted, linked and actioned to produce new forms of rule, new subjects of property, and new avenues of accumulation. If our inherited urban property regimes are inextricably linked to modernist bureaucratic technologies – records, titles, and maps – central to the reproduction of hegemonic gendered and racialized urban dis/possession – then alterations to those technologies, alterations to the ways property is understood, visualized and actioned hold the potential to fundamentally change the valences of property itself (see Gilroy 1998); automating the production of “group differentiated vulnerabilities” (Gilmore 2007) to dispossession at multiple scales. And yet, the deep social and technical mediation of these projects of digitized urban enclosure, their anchorage to lively social and techno-political grounds, also expose new state digital infrastructures to political struggle and contestation, presenting opportunities for unlikely new urban coalitions to insert quite other modes of inhabitation into state technological systems, pixelate smooth geospatial imagery, refigure algorithmic sorting, and glitch data-driven enclosure. Drawing on extensive ethnographical fieldwork tracing the implementation of India’s largest state-led property digitization programme since 2021, the paper considers how novel political claims to urban life are being coded into otherwise hegemonic government systems of technological enclosure; productive of a glitch commons within landscapes of data-driven dispossession.