Desiree Fields

Fellow, SCAS.
Associate Professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies, University of California, Berkeley

Desiree Fields is an economic geographer and critical urban scholar. She completed her Ph.D. in Environ-
mental Psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2013 and was a lecturer
in geography at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom before taking up her position at UC Berke-
ley. She is also a trustee of the Urban Studies Foundation and an editor of the journal Environment and
Planning A: Economy and Space.

Fields’ research revolves around the role of housing in capitalist urbanization, focusing on how finance
capital and digital technologies are shifting the terrain of the housing question in the 21st century. The US
National Science Foundation, the British Academy, and the Independent Social Research Foundation have
all supported her work. Her last project, Automated Landlord, explored how a wave of advances in digital
technology has deepened, diversified, and globally expanded the financialization of rental housing in the
post-2008 era. Fields’ research has been published in leading human geography and urban studies journals,
including Progress in Human Geography, Economic Geography, Environment and Planning A, Urban
Studies, and International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.

At SCAS, Fields will continue to examine the intersection of the financial and the digital in property markets,
with a focus on automated and algorithmic appraisal and digital platforms that provide real estate investment
opportunities. The project will add to our understanding of the fundamental role of technological progress in
how relationships to landed property are constituted and reconstituted, and in whose interests, throughout
global capitalism.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2023-24.