Anti-digital mapping and other seriously stylish interventions have taken cues from protest groups like the Umbrella Movement. Many now see them as key areas in which architects can play a role alongside other designers and urbanists to halt the encroachment of certain proptech entities with software that can learn “the concept of gentrification itself."

Knott eventually tied anti-gentrification pushback against high tech real estate to the long-standing tradition of intervention into urban planning endeavors, saying that, in the end, it is up to communities of people who can utilize the notion in an all-out effort to prevent the wholesale creation of what he called the “algorithmic city.”

“Design alone won’t save neighbourhoods from the gentrifying tendencies of urbanism tech. But if real estate and public authorities and private interests continue to treat the city as a spreadsheet, trusting it to be read, charted and optimised by machine vision, then it’s not enough simply to gain access to or modify that information. What we need is situated glitch urbanisms and communities that thrive on the ephemeral, localised aesthetics and knowledges that don’t fit in a dataset or datastore. What we need is to push the city outside of the machinic view.”