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Digital real estate technologies (Proptech) have rapidly become ubiquitous in many nations—including Australia—their presence reshaping how tenants, landlords and agents navigate private renting. How Proptech are mediated by regulatory settings and responses shapes their presence, impacting on their potential for both subtle and overt forms of discrimination. In this paper we draw on our Australian-based research to illustrate the utility of a rental schema to develop understandings of digital reconfigurations and their discrimination effects in the private rental sector. Our research sought to identify and examine discrimination against renters across the entire experience of renting—particularly in relation to new and emerging forms of discrimination arising from, or exacerbated by, digital technologies. By focusing on the experiences of renters, the schema that we employed inverts Proptech approaches that create and target new assets for financial extraction through the rental sector, instead recognising the discriminatory potential of such approaches. We signal the utility of this renter-experience-centred approach to examine the rental sector through a discrimination lens, and the real and potential role for regulation including, but not limited to, a focus on digital technologies. Incorporating research, alliance-building and advocacy into our schema bolsters its renter-centredness and reiterates the necessity of these efforts at housing justice for urgent regulatory reform. We point to our own nascent efforts in collaboration with Australian tenant advocacy groups—inspired by others—to use digital technologies to subvert embedded power imbalances that drive discrimination in Australia's private rental sector.

In the late 2010s, publics in the UK encountered new kinds of street furniture: Strawberry Energy Smart benches in London and InLinkUK kiosks in Glasgow, with smart features such as phone charging, free Wi-Fi, free phone calls, information screens and environmental data. This article analyses how smart street furniture is socially constructed by relevant social groups, each with different interests, forms of power and meanings. Smartness became associated not only with advanced technologies, but with a neoliberal agenda of private-public partnerships promising urban transformations, such as free devices for councils and citizens in exchange for access to advertising or sponsorship space in public places. The research examined the design, use and governance of new types of smart street furniture using mixed methods, including document analysis of promotional and regulatory texts, site observations of these devices, and interviews. We found that the uses and meanings of these devices were discovered at different moments by technology companies, local councils, and the public. Few members of the public knew about the devices, and showed little interest in them, even if they were the assumed users. An exception was gig workers and people experiencing homelessness who found uses for the smart features and a community activist who campaigned against these as surveillant and intrusive. Businesses and councils embraced smart city visions but took multiple approaches to agreements for the implementation and governance of smart street furniture. Notably, these more powerful groups discovered and negotiated the meanings of smart street furniture well before these were publicly encountered. This article reveals how a social construction of technology (SCOT) approach is strongest when it accounts for the relative power of social groups in struggles over meanings and resources. It provides empirical information on everyday sociotechnical encounters that provide nuanced evidence for wider critiques of smart city agendas.