Keywords: Evictions, Housing, Mapping, Gentrification
The Anti-Eviction Handbook is concerned with “documenting the dispossession and resistance of San Francisco Bay Area residents facing gentrifying landscapes.” By documenting dispossession, it is thought that residents will be better able to resist it.
“The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP) is a data visualization, data analysis, and oral history collective documenting the dispossession and resistance of San Francisco Bay Area residents facing gentrifying landscapes.” They frame themselves as a horizontally structured, “fluid collective” ; “as much a platform for regional activists to collaborate and learn from each other, as it is a content-generating research effort.” They started in 2011, “when the Bay Area began experiencing a dramatic increase in eviction rates.”
Author: Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, San Francisco, 2018
The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project is driven by principles of direct democracy or participatory democracy. There is an emphasis on horizontal and consensus-based decision making, and building grassroots coalitions with residents through which to produce collective knowledge. They are also committed to direct action. Rather than using data to lobby governments or influence public officials, they are using data as an organizing tool to directly mobilize residents in opposing gentrification.
The guidebook acknowledges the inherent limitations of map-making, noting “the dangers of reducing complex social and political worlds to simple dots – such data can never fully describe the personal and neighbourhood displacements through gentrification.”