PhD Oral Exam - Mieko Tarrius, Geography, Urban and Environmental Studies

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

By clustering in cities, tech industries have catalyzed gentrification, reshaping local economies, communities, and social relations, eventually reinforcing spatial inequality. While prior research emphasizes capital and class, recent studies highlight the deep entanglement of tech-led gentrification, and more broadly tech urbanism, with race and whiteness. Indeed, within racial capitalist logics, tech urbanism frames marginalized neighborhoods as neglected, mobilizing “innovation” and utopian tech imaginaries to rationalize racialized dispossession. Yet, despite growing fascination with tech urbanism, its temporal politics remain underexplored; particularly how race shapes perceptions of who belongs in the city’s future. By situating whiteness at the core of tech-led urban transformations, my dissertation addresses this critical gap, illuminating how future-focused discourses of “progress” operate as mechanisms of racialized urban control in the present. Using a whiteness-as-futurity framework, it compares Philadelphia’s University City and Montreal’s Parc Extension to illustrate how tech-led gentrification unfolds along racialized temporal logics. The first manuscript conceptually examines tech futurities as expressions of whiteness, showing how “future city” narratives drive tech-led gentrification and marginalize longstanding, Black and Brown residents. The second situates gentrification within a state-university-tech nexus, demonstrating how institutional actors cast racialized communities as deficient while positioning the white, educated tech class as stewards of urban change. The third draws on interviews with 33 tech workers and entrepreneurs, revealing narratives that legitimize exclusion and erase non-white, working-class histories. Against the backdrop of technocapitalist growth and racialized redevelopment, this research ultimately conceptualizes tech-led gentrification as a racial-temporal process, demonstrating how visions of tech-driven “modernity” uphold white supremacy in contemporary cities.