St-Hilaire, Cloé2026-06-242026-06-242026-06-242026-06-11https://hdl.handle.net/10012/23669Housing is one of the most physical, tangible components of everyday life, and yet as rentiers occupy more and more space in the economy and society, housing is transformed into abstract financial products and digitally rendered into platforms, apps, and data. The increasing presence of platforms in urban life, primarily under corporate ownership, is reshaping how we view, research, understand, and experience housing. For tenants, it has translated into the digitization of the rental housing experience, from apartment search, tenant screening, to monthly payments. For landlords, it has meant increasing means for extracting value from tenants, derived from insights produced by data. For researchers and activists, it manifests as opaque information landscapes, leaving key questions unanswered and hindering housing justice efforts. For policymakers, it remains a display of fragmented data infrastructures. As housing continues to embody its contradictory nature between home (use value) and profit (exchange value), the digitization of rental housing warrants further scrutiny into how it contributes to the speculative conditions of housing under rentier capitalism. This thesis offers an epistemological investigation of the rise of data and digital technologies in Canada’s rental housing sector. It argues that the deployment of technology in rental housing, and the data that is produced as a result, (re)produces uneven epistemic outcomes that benefit capital and hampers social justice. This digital turn in housing has been led by rentiers who use platforms, apps, algorithms, and data for the production of housing information. By controlling the data pipelines, rentiers are able to dictate what gets measured (and what does not), frame housing digitization under deterministic discourses of progress and efficiency, and limit other’s capacities to know via the corporate gatekeeping of information. This leads to epistemic injustices against those who become targets, objects, and test subjects of housing datafication, and who are at the same time prevented from meaningfully understanding how this datafication affects them. From an urban governance perspective, the city under digitization remains governed through veils of opacity marked by inadequate data infrastructure, also creating epistemic injustices. This analysis combines a qualitative document and media overview of proptech and finance in Canada, a spatial analysis of proptech adoption in the build-to-rent sector of four cities, select Canadian case studies, key informant interviews, and a large-scale analysis of housing data infrastructures. The findings are separated into four empirical chapters pertaining to proptech and/or ownership data. The first article critically examines the socio-technical imaginaries of proptech–efficiency, lifestyle, sustainability, and democratization–as carried through by the industry and the media, and how these imaginaries are examples of technological determinism. The second chapter analyzes the adoption of proptech in Canada’s build-to-rent housing submarkets in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, and Montreal, the major adopters of rental proptech, and the characteristics of buildings with high proptech adoption. The third chapter presents the theoretical concept of epistemic engulfment to help make sense of the implications of the rise of proptech propelled by finance on the epistemic regimes of housing, and its implications for housing and urban justice. The fourth chapter analyzes the ownership data infrastructures of 31 cities across North America and Europe to determine why ownership data remains opaque despite increasing digitizing efforts from states and cities, and how ownership data opacity prevents the answering of key urban questions. In its entirety, this thesis offers an epistemological critique of the rise of digital technologies in rental housing under financialization through an analysis of its discourses and data infrastructures. It illustrates how the production of housing data under the control of private actors contributes to the already uneven power relationship between landlords and tenants through injustices that are epistemic in nature. It shows how urban governance contributes to the making of the conditions that allow us to know about urban issues, or remain in the dark. This thesis inserts itself in larger discussions about viewing housing data as a political subject and urges planning scholars to endeavour in critical reflections about urban information.enDigitzationFinancializationHousingEpistemologyEpistemic injusticeProptechDoctoral Thesis