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The language of networks has become a common conceptual framework for describing contemporary, digitally-engaged social movements. In this paper I address the subject of digital contention from a geographical perspective, using network analysis and qualitative data to explore the networked digital contention of anti-water charges community groups in Dublin, Ireland. Focusing thematically on network fragmentation, I use places and practices as frames to understand this situated case study and make two main points. First, social media networks are constituted through choices by individuals about how to articulate place relationally to fulfil specific political and social objectives. Second, contextual and historical components of specific places can provide an explanatory mechanism for understanding points of concentration and fragmentation in the network. Network analysis is useful for visualising and interpreting digital contention but augmenting network analysis with qualitative methods of data collection allows for deeper understanding of the geographical nuances of digital contention.

This paper adopts an empirical focus on the everyday practices of Take Back the City, a housing activist campaign in Summer 2018 in Dublin, as an illustration of occupations as digital/material contention. It outlines how the temporary political occupations of vacant buildings were organised and unfolded across a digital/material nexus. I argue that reading occupations as digital/material (a) extends understandings of how urban struggles actually take place in contemporary cities, and (b) highlights the central role of the digital in contentious space-times before, during, and in the wake of temporary political occupations. I use the Take Back the City campaign to explore the relationship between urban spaces, digital technologies, and contemporary housing movements. Echoing recent work on radical urban space-times, I emphasise the digital/material practices and temporalities of the Take Back the City campaign as a useful example for research on the makeshift, improvised, and often uncertain ways in which digital technologies and urban space are now enrolled in struggles over housing futures.

This paper’s main argument is that housing financialisation can be understood as a set of intertwined digital/material processes, and that resisting housing financialisation requires activism that recognises and capitalises on this dynamic. Drawing from Desiree Fields’ (2017a) work on urban struggles with financialisation, this conceptual argument is unpacked through a case study of post-crash Dublin, an urban space reshaped by housing financialisation and struggles resisting it. Housing has been a key subject of contention in post-crash Dublin and activists’ digital/material struggles illustrate how digital technologies and platforms can be and are appropriated to resist housing financialisation. The paper traces the intertwining of housing financialisation, resistance, and the digital in post-crash Dublin and argues that future research on platform real estate, urbanism, and automated landlord practices must take seriously the ambivalent opportunities, agency, and counter narratives that housing activists create through their digital/material practices.

This paper’s main argument is that housing financialisation can be understood as a set of intertwined digital/material processes, and that resisting housing financialisation requires activism that recognises and capitalises on this dynamic. Drawing from Desiree Fields’ (2017a) work on urban struggles with financialisation, this conceptual argument is unpacked through a case study of post-crash Dublin, an urban space reshaped by housing financialisation and struggles resisting it. Housing has been a key subject of contention in post-crash Dublin and activists’ digital/material struggles illustrate how digital technologies and platforms can be and are appropriated to resist housing financialisation. The paper traces the intertwining of housing financialisation, resistance, and the digital in post-crash Dublin and argues that future research on platform real estate, urbanism, and automated landlord practices must take seriously the ambivalent opportunities, agency, and counter narratives that housing activists create through their digital/material practices.

This paper adopts an empirical focus on the everyday practices of Take Back the City, a housing activist campaign in Summer 2018 in Dublin, as an illustration of occupations as digital/material contention. It outlines how the temporary political occupations of vacant buildings were organised and unfolded across a digital/material nexus. I argue that reading occupations as digital/material (a) extends understandings of how urban struggles actually take place in contemporary cities, and (b) highlights the central role of the digital in contentious space-times before, during, and in the wake of temporary political occupations. I use the Take Back the City campaign to explore the relationship between urban spaces, digital technologies, and contemporary housing movements. Echoing recent work on radical urban space-times, I emphasise the digital/material practices and temporalities of the Take Back the City campaign as a useful example for research on the makeshift, improvised, and often uncertain ways in which digital technologies and urban space are now enrolled in struggles over housing futures.