April Keynote Speakers
KEYNOTE 1:
Why predicting gentrification can make Nashville a more equitable place to live
Abstract:
By helping policy makers, community members and planners better allocate their limited resources, machine learning can make cities more productive and equitable places to live and work. Unlike business which has but one bottom line, cities have many, including social and political cohesion and economic inclusion. In this talk, Dr. Steif will introduce a public policy framework for the use of machine learning to predict gentrification and how these predictions can help cities balance growth and equity. He will attempt to demonstrate a predictive approach to gentrification by analyzing recent housing trends in Nashville.
Bio:
Dr. Ken Steif works at the intersection of data science and public policy. He combines technical knowledge of spatial analysis, machine learning and econometrics with an interest in housing policy, education, the economics of neighborhood change, transportation policy and more. Dr. Steif is the Director of the Master of Urban Spatial Analytics at the University of Pennsylvania and teaches multiple courses in the City Planning Department at Penn. He partners with government, as well as the for-profit and non-profit sectors, helping stakeholders convert their data into actionable intelligence. As of late, his work has focused on spatial machine learning in the public health and public safety realms as well as prediction in neighborhood real estate markets.
KEYNOTE 2:
Counter-mapping Against Displacement: On the Work of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project
Abstract:
In this talk, Erin McElroy will describe the work of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project - a data-visualization, data analysis, and storytelling collective documenting the dispossession of San Francisco Bay Area residents upon gentrifying landscapes. Through digital maps, oral history work, film, murals, and community events, the project renders connections between the nodes and effects of new entanglements of global capital, real estate, high tech, and political economy. While studying the displacement of people, the project also looks to the transformation of complex social worlds as certain spaces become desirable to such entanglements. The AEMP understands its data and mapping efforts to be multi-temporal, on one hand working alongside those pushing for policy reform as a form of short-term harm reduction, but on the other, pushing for more revolutionary and radical visions beyond the reformist horizon. In this talk, Erin will share the collective’s work and methods, focusing on the San Francisco Bay Area region. Time will also be spent to think through what methods might be instructive to new data research being performed housing activists elsewhere, and how community-derived data work can inform direction action tactics and strategizing.
Bio:
Erin McElroy is cofounder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, a digital cartography and storytelling collective documenting dispossession and resistance struggles upon gentrifying landscapes. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area and with new branches in Los Angeles and
New York City, the group prioritizes creating data with an array of community partners and activist groups, always to further housing justice, anti-racist organizing, and interdisciplinary analysis. Erin is also a doctoral candidate in Feminist Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz, working on a project on techno imaginaries and materialities in postsocialist Romania, particularly as they intersect with and diverge from Silicon Valley imperatives. Erin is also cofounder of a new activist-based peer-review journal, the Radical Housing Journal, which will be distributing its first issue this coming fall.
FEATURED SPEAKERS
- Adriane Bond Harris - Director, Mayor’s Office of Housing (Nashville, TN)
- Dr. James Fraser - Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN)