In the last week of March, Rob, Juliette and Carla’s schedules were packed full with a week-long attendance at the American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting, held in Detroit, Michigan. This was the first AAG for Juliette, and a return after many years’ absence for Carla and Rob. It must be said that the sessions certainly did not disappoint. The week was packed with sessions organised by the team and papers presented by them, but we also co-organised a tour of Detroit and a print-making workshop. Below we highlight some of the key moments from the conference.

Data, Housing and Planning I & II 

Despite flying all Sunday and feeling jet lagged, the Data Stories team, along with co-organiser Dr. Taylor Shelton, had the (mis)fortune of having their first back-to-back sessions slotted for Monday, the very first day of the conference, at 8.30 am. A total of 8 papers were presented on the themes of data debates, deriving sentiment from housing on data, data narratives and the politics and complications of aggregating housing data. Rob Kitchin presented work from phase 1 of the project in a paper titled, Data debates in housing and planning: The data politics of facts and counter-facts. Overall, the papers presented in this session were excellent. If all goes as planned, a selection of these papers will become part of a special issue in a housing journal. We will update the blog with details when that happens. 

Theoretical Perspectives on Research Creation in Place and the Built Environment I & II 

The second organised session was also held bright and early at 8.30 on Wednesday. Two back-to-back sessions brought together researchers and artists working at the intersection where social science methods and arts-based methods intersect. A total of 9 presenters used wide-ranging case studies (green and blue environments, transportation, disability, war, data dashboards) as well as a series of mediums (comics, workshops, storytelling, archiveology, sculpture, visual storytelling, photographs) to theorise research creation and the co-creation of knowledge. Carla Kayanan opened up the session with a paper titled, Exploring the synergy between artistic practices and academia in shaping the built environment towards research-creation methods. This paper builds on previous work on research creation but draws from longer engagement with the first set of artists in residence. 

The final paper-related event occurred on Thursday with Juliette Davret presenting the paper Rethinking datafied movements: A critical comparison of direct action and lobbying as data activism in an urban context. This paper was accepted in Dr. Eugene McCann and Dr. Magie Ramirez’s pre-organised session, Futures of organizing and the urban: Confronting crisis in theory and practice. 

Exploring beyond the conference 

Outside of Huntington Place’s walls, the convention centre that housed the AAG, the Data Stories team members engaged in events that gave them the opportunity to experience Detroit’s built environment and its artistic community. On Thursday afternoon, Detroit scholar and historian, Dr. Patrick Cooper-McCann, took a group of Irish Geographers on a walking tour of downtown Detroit. 

The walk consisted mostly of discussions outside of buildings along Woodward, however we did enter the Guardian building and the Whitney hotel. 

Finally, on the last day of the conference, Data Stories team members tagged along with Australian Geographers to attend a workshop by visual artist and printer Wendy Murray hosted in the workshop of Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. Wendy kindly took a morning to share her love of printing with the group. As part of the event, Dr. Kurt Iveson lead us on a walk of Wendy’s Detroit neighbourhood while the group, per Wendy’s request, focused on emergent feelings from the walk. These sentiments were then used to co-create a series of prints that Wendy then gifted to us. Additionally, though absent on the day, Amos had generously prepared a series of prints to present to our group. We cannot encourage you enough to purchase Amos’s beautiful and recently released book, Citizen Printer, and to read more about him and his work in this 2024 article by Charlotte Beach. 

On Saturday 29th March Eviction Nation was launched at Connolly Books. This report, published by the Community Action Tenants Union, provides analysis of legal and illegal evictions since 2015, based on dispute outcomes published by the Residential Tenancies Board (RTB). The report outlines failures of regulation which allow evictions to take place on a widespread scale.

Photo: Over 60 people gathered in Connolly Books to launch the Eviction Nation report, credit Job van Aken

The CATU eviction database group has been working on the project for over a year and a half, coordinated by Fiadh Tubridy. The project has grown out of years of landlord research conducted by CATU members to defend fellow members against eviction. Two researchers from the Data Stories team, Samuel Mutter and Danielle Hynes, joined the eviction database group in early 2024, contributing alongside those already undertaking the research, including Utrecht University researcher Anushka Dasgupta and independent researcher Michelle Connolly, as well as many others.

Photo: James Corscadden, the software developer who created the topevictors.ie website, discusses the work, credit Danielle Hynes

The project included two key outputs: a website and report. The website launched in late February, and includes an interactive map of all evictions in Ireland recorded within RTB data from 2015-2024, and profiles the landlords responsible for the highest number of evictions, showing their influence on the housing system and the lives of tenants in Ireland as well as the strategies they use to evict tenants, with further detail and analysis provided in the report.

Photo: Printed copies of Eviction Nation for sale at the launch, credit Job van Aken

The website reveals 353 officially recorded illegal evictions between 2015 and 2024, as well as 4,524 eviction orders issued by the RTB – these are ‘legal’ evictions which have come through the RTB disputes process. The analysis of legal evictions was aided by Data Stories team member Oliver Dawkins, who assisted in gathering the RTB data held in individual scanned PDFs, made the documents text-searchable, and used advanced data processing techniques to extract the required information.

A key finding of the research was that both small landlords, who may only own a few properties, and large landlords including corporate real estate investors and Approved Housing Bodies, often evict tenants in pursuit of profit. Small landlords are disproportionately responsible for the violent, sensational types of illegal eviction that occasionally catch media attention, and can give rise to the narrative that it is only ‘a few bad apples’ that mistreat their tenants. However, large landlords are responsible for a growing proportion of total evictions, reflecting the growing consolidation of the rental market in Ireland and the fact that these actors have the knowledge and resources to follow the relatively simple process to evict their tenants legally. While small and large landlords have different ways of dealing with tenants, in both cases their business models can involve eviction.

The less dramatic, and entirely legal evictions are often just as devastating for those forced out of their homes. Ultimately, the strategies of both small and large landlords are motivated by private profit and both are deeply harmful to tenants. Work such as the Eviction Nation report and the landlord database website, collectively undertaken in order to assist tenants to organise and defend against eviction, are essential in challenging the injustice of widespread evictions.

At the launch, data visualisation expert Rudi O’Malley presented work he has created with the data gathered by the CATU eviction database team. The visualisation, named Snakes and Landlords, presents some aspects of the research in a digestible, interactive format, highlighting some of the key findings of the research.

Photo: Rudi O’Malley presents his data visualisation to the delighted crowd, credit Danielle Hynes

Enormous thanks to everyone who contributed to the project, and to those who came on the night and engaged with great discussion, questions and ideas for next steps for the project. Physical copies of the report are available for purchase at Connolly Books, The Library Project and Little Deer Comics, Dublin.

Data Voids: Understanding Digital Geographies of the Built Environment through Negativity and Refusal 

Session Organisers: Danielle Hynes & Samuel Mutter 

Emerging work in cultural geography has called on researchers to consider the (im)potential of ‘negative’ spaces and affects, asking what can be done with voids, limits and (in)capacities of different kinds (e.g. Bissell et al, 2021). Meanwhile, across media and cultural studies, critical data studies and feminist and political geography there is growing attention to the possibilities of refusal (e.g. James et al., 2023), particularly refusal as a collective and generative response to datafied systems. Both bodies of work are concerned with gaps, absences, silences and negation, though with varied foci and orientations toward action. 

Our session seeks to bring these literatures into conversation, with a particular focus on digital data and the built environment. 

The governance of built environments is increasingly informed and narrated through digital data – from ‘evidence-based’ planning, to the modelling of land/housing markets, and uses of ‘proptech’ to facilitate investment or discipline tenants, data seem almost as foundational as bricks and mortar. Yet such data are often characterised by absences, gaps and silences. Such absences prompt initiatives to fix, ‘free’ and/or repurpose the data in order to enhance access and transparency. However, recent work problematises transparency as a universal response to data-driven systems, pointing to refusal and data justice as approaches pursuing a structural shift relative to data harms. 

The session will seek theoretical and empirical contributions pertaining to questions including, but not limited to: 

• What might an attention to data voids from the perspective of negative geographies and refusal illuminate? 

• How do absences of data shape the built environment? 

• How do acts of refusal in the face of data-driven governance generate meaningful political and spatial alternatives? 

• How might methodological approaches to data be developed or reconceived through working with refusal and negativity? 

• How do we reckon with refusal alongside the politics of data suppression? 

• How do we register what or who is left absent (unbuilt, unseen or unheard) by/through data in its shaping of built spaces? 

Papers from this session will be considered for a potential Special Issue in a relevant journal.

Submit abstracts (max 250 words) by *April 30, 2025* here, selecting Special Session 8. 

More information about the conference can be found here. 

Notifications of acceptance will be sent by *May 15, 2025*.