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Private renting increasingly comprises a complex ecosystem of actors who assemble housing within the market, and collect rental income and data from tenants, and data on the material assets themselves. Our analysis – at the intersection of rentier and platform capitalism – focuses on landed (material real estate) and technological (digital infrastructure and data) property in Australia’s private rental system. Drawing out relationships between the various actors – landlords, rental property managers and real estate agencies, software developers and providers, property developers and investors – and both their properties and their uses of Proptech (property technology), we show how housing and technology are being leveraged for profit in new ways. In Australia, landed property retains its precedence for established (individual and institutional) landlords, whose interest in Proptech relates to enhancing or value-adding to rental housing assets. For Proptech and institutional real estate players seeking to consolidate both landed and technology property, capturing the tech landscape is increasingly important; indeed, securing control and/or consolidation of technology property is a key motivation for building and/or using Proptech among the largest property developers. Our findings show how rent extraction operates across and between different types and scales of property and market actors, and in new ways that differentiate the figure of the rentier while upholding the dynamics of the rentier model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary advances the 'hack' as an urban concept. While the hack transcends existing literatures on the digital and informality, it is a distinctive concept and is being used systematically in new domains. I situate the hack conceptually, outline its empirical and methodological value and propose a framework to research the urban hack. Importantly, it is not just the technologies of hacking but the translation of computational logics to the urban that underpins the importance of the hack, as well as the critical need to set out a research agenda surrounding the hack within urban studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Urban Studies (Sage Publications, Ltd.) is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Urban Studies (Sage Publications, Ltd.) is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this article the authors extend the concept of the museum and its collecting practices to record collections, and position record collections as musical archives that are representative of our popular music heritage. They recognize the role of material culture and museums in fostering social memory while also noting the absence of second-wave feminism in museum representation. Research on the archival turn in feminism suggests some intersections between material culture literature and some feminist thought and practices, but such overlap requires further examination. The authors suggest that masculine dominance of record collecting has implications for representing whose music heritage and tastes are being preserved. The literature on collecting has traditionally defined masculine actors as collectors while positioning feminine actors as consumers. This article looks at record collecting in detail and argues that a feminist critique of archiving in record collecting provides valuable insights into gender and power relations. Ethnographic research of record collectors conducted in 2006 and 2010–2013 shows that women do collect, but their collecting practices are overlooked due to the type of objects or genres being collected, and where they do exhibit the same qualities of masculine collectors, they are seen as anomalies and often downplay the value of their collections. Furthermore, gender bias is perpetuated when personal collections become the basis of musical canons and are institutionalized through reissue labels or museum collections. This maintains the masculine hegemony seen in music cultures more generally and has implications for creating and building an inclusive musical heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]