Dr. Desiree Fields

Biography

Desiree Fields is an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, and a faculty affiliate of the Global Metropolitan Studies and Berkeley Economy Society Initiative. She co-leads an interdisciplinary research group focused on the digital transformations impacting global land, housing, and property. Fields works as a critical economic geographer and urban scholar, examining how property, finance, and technology reproduce social and spatial hierarchies in the United States. Her core research investigates the processes of economic and technological change that unevenly reshape urban space and social relations concerning land and housing. She has conducted significant projects analyzing how digital capitalists are undertaking urban-scale experiments to build entire cities from scratch in rural landscapes, addressing existing urban problems. Her recent investigations delve into the mobilization of technology to reconfigure property relations within housing markets. Furthermore, Fields explores the political economic experiments that attempt to radically rearrange space, examining the conflicting visions of value, productivity, and the nature of blank slate urbanism driven by digital capitalists. She is a fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala, Sweden, and prior to her position at UC Berkeley, she facilitated courses as a lecturer at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom and served as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Urban Studies at Queens College, City University of New York. Fields earned her Ph.D. in Environmental Psychology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Research Interests

Courses