Ali Shamas Qadeer is a designerand educator based in Toronto. His work focuses on the intersection of design labour and political economy as well as digital surveillance. Ali teaches graphic design at OCAD University.
A gentrification tax
is an artist, designer, theorist, and educator, whose work focuses on the relation between physical spaces and political economic forces. (University of Waterloo School of Architecture)
Tenants in large cities are commonly displaced by gentrification as landlords use all means possible to raise their rents or replace them with higher paying more affluent residents. Through this process landlords profit from an “unearned increment”; the value embedded in real estate not created by a private owner, but by Indigenous people, local cultures, tenants, neighborhood and community organizations, publicly funded infrastructure, and non-human biotic and abiotic ecologies.