‘commute’ by Joe Daniels, The Oculus, World Trade Center, New York, NY.
Crowds, markets, and collectives
Concerns over urban democracy and economy have placed the figure of ‘the crowd’ centrally. Yet, oddly, in our efforts to understand the power and legacy of the ‘rational individual’ we have largely ignored collective being, and in so doing, allowed regressive political economies to colonize ‘the collective’ as a site of progressive claim making in our contemporary economies. My work is a call to better understand the role of the ‘collective’ as it is configured in particular geohistorical conjunctures. Just as we have placed the economic theories that provide the scientific legitimation of market coordination under a microscope, we need to place the ‘discovery’ of social network theories—be it of crowds or otherwise—as the scientific legitimation of an emergent platform capitalism under the same microscope. I would contend that the managing of crowds is a defining feature of our contemporary political economy.
UBC/UoN PhD dissertation: Daniels, J. (2021) Crowd Cash and the City: the reemergence of the crowd as a financial ‘actor’ and the reimagining of urban development futures.
Daniels, J., Hilt, M., and E. Wyly. (2021) The evolution of splintering urbanism in planetary informational ecosystems. In V. Fast., D. Mackinnon, and R. Burns (Eds.) Digital (In)Justice in the Smart City. University of Toronto Press.
Wyly, E., Daniels, J., Dhanani, T. and C. Yeung. (2018) Hayak in the cloud: conservative cognition and the evolution of the smart city. City 22 (506) 820-842.
‘city building’ by Joe Daniels, Brooklyn, NYC.
Platform economies, platform urbanism, platform cultures
‘leaving work’ by Joe Daniels, Swiss Re Building, London, UK.
Money and finance in the ‘smart city’
‘social tower’ by Joe Daniels, HDB flats in Singapore.
Housing, real estate, and community development futures
Housing and a theoretical interest in the social forms that arise to support the production of ‘property’ as a financial asset has been at the core of my interest throughout my career. In part, the interest in crowdfunding arouse out of a desire to understanding how this monetary form was being put to work in urban property markets. And while this took a secondary position over a more general concern for urban governance in my Ph.D., it will play a more central role in my future research program on the alternative monetary and social forms that are emerging around renewed interest in social and affordable housing. New modalities are emerging around the world at the intersections of money and housing ripe for opening up what is possible in our current condition and for what might become. As such, this is an optimistic, speculative form of research seeking out our alternative futures.
UBC/UoN PhD dissertation: Daniels, J. (2021) Crowd Cash and the City: the reemergence of the crowd as a financial ‘actor’ and the reimagining of urban development futures.
Card, K., Daniels, J. , and Comandon, A.(2019) Grounding the housing question in land: on Anne Haila’s Urban Land Rent. In H. Leitner, J. Peck, and E, Sheppard (Eds.) Urban Studies Inside/Out. Sage. New York.
Daniels, J. (2018) Crowd(fund)ed cities: urbanism without experts and its contradictions: Paper presented at the 2018 AAG Annual Meeting, New Orleans, 10 April.
Daniels, J. (2017) Urban Land Rent: Singapore as a property state, by Anne Haila. Reviewed In: Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 38(1) 148-150.
M.A. Thesis: Securitizing Spectacle: real estate investment trusts, property, and the financialization of urban retail space in Singapore
Teaching for GEOG/URST 200/250; Housing in the Canadian Context; Racial discrimination in North American housing markets