Desiree Fields

Blank Slate Urbanism: California Forever and Digital Capitalist City-Building Experiments

Digital capitalists are increasingly mobilizing urban-scale experiments that seek to build entire cities ‘from scratch’ in rural landscapes as a way out of existing urban problems. We characterize these experiments as blank slate urbanism, embodying ideas of renewal and implying an emptiness that makes it possible to project or program a future. But perceptions of blankness are also situated, dependent, inter alia, on what developments and resources are being mapped and whose perspective informs planning. Blank slates for urban developments are produced through processes of literal and figurative demolition and erasure—of both material and physical space, and the cultural, social, and political economic processes that (re)produce those spaces. Blankness is therefore also a value judgment about what is (not) worth preserving, and inherently a power relation.

Desiree Fields is Associate Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley. She is an economic geographer and critical urban scholar. Her research program addresses how Wall Street and Silicon Valley are jointly transforming property relations, urbanization, and economic subjectivity. She has published widely in leading human geography and urban studies journals, including Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Progress in Human Geography, Environment and Planning A, and Urban Studies. Dr. Fields was a fellow of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in 2023-24. She is a trustee of the Urban Studies Foundation and an editor at Environment and Planning A and Housing, Theory, and Society.

Light refreshments will be served. This event is open to Columbia University affiliates with a valid university ID. Any questions on the events can be directed Diana Guo, dg3372@columbia.edu; Vinita Govindarajan, vg2588@columbia.edu; Mauricio Enrique Rada Orellana, mer2245@columbia.edu

The Lecture in Planning Series (LiPS) is organized by the Urban Planning Office second year PhD students in Urban Planning: Vinita Govindarajan, Diana Guo, and Mauricio Rada Orellana.