Between 2014 and 2020, the Large Lots program sold hundreds of city-owned lots for a dollar to property owners across Chicago's South and West Sides. While Large Lots helped return land to tax rolls and offset its holding costs, the city cast it as an effort to empower residents and turn vacant lots into vibrant neighborhoods. This talk examines the labor of making vibrant neighborhoods. Against its erasure by the city planning imaginary, I situate this labor as an important dimension of life's work under regimes of organized abandonment and their attendant economies of real estate speculation. Through interviews with lot owners, I demonstrate that Large Lots reconfigures relations of responsibility around vacant land in ways that enroll residents' social reproductive labor of land care into the production of investable landscapes. Through a property records analysis, I show that Large Lots establishes renewed channels for speculation in program neighborhoods. These findings situate social reproduction as a generative vantage point for critical understandings of real estate speculation and the uneven geographies of life-making it engenders. I conclude with a critical reflection on deeds registries as archives within which to trace speculative real estate investments and the layered histories of dispossession that constitute their conditions of possibility.


Dr. Rea Zaimi is a critical urban geographer whose research and teaching center on the political economy of housing and real estate in US cities. Dr. Zaimi's archival and ethnographic research examines how historic property regimes structure contemporary processes of speculative and predatory real estate investment, and their implications for housing precarity and life's work in Chicago and Atlanta. Her work is committed to advancing our understanding of the mechanisms that embed social difference within the economic and institutional infrastructures shaping access to shelter. Rea earned her MA and PhD in Geography at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is an Assistant Professor in the Urban Studies Institute at Georgia State University with a faculty affiliation in the Department of Geosciences.