This presentation examines the racialized dynamics of tech-led gentrification in Philadelphia’s University City and Montreal’s Parc Extension. While gentrification has often been analyzed as a class process, recent scholarship emphasizes its roots in racial capitalism, showing how urban transformation profits from racialized bodies and spaces while reproducing colonial logics. Building on this work, I argue that tech urbanism intensifies these dynamics. Under technocapitalism, cities are remade through a state-university-tech nexus that functions as the infrastructure of gentrification, reshaping urban life not only spatially but temporally. Futurist imaginaries promoted by this nexus cast long-standing racialized communities as “under-skilled,” while white, educated tech workers are positioned as the inheritors of urban futures. By foregrounding temporality, I show that tech-led gentrification reproduces whiteness not only through material displacement but also through symbolic acts of temporal erasure. The article highlights how state-supported tech futurities are inseparable from the production and maintenance of white futurity itself.

Authors:
Mieko Tarrius, Université Paris-Est Créteil, France

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Mieko Tarrius is currently Head of Engaged Science and Associate Researcher at Université Paris-Est Créteil. Her research focuses on technology, urban policy, futurity, and racial and gendered systems of domination.

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/miekotarrius/

See this presentation on the full schedule – Tuesday Schedule

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