Lukas Vrbka

I am a political and legal anthropologist focused on questions related to value, liberalism and bureaucracy. My dissertation project, "The Ends of Property: Land, Rent, and Reform in New York City," follows conflicts over rent between New York's neighborhoods and state institutions and through the phases of extraction, adjudication and regulation. In doing so, I ask what rent reveals about urban land: what it is, who it is for and how this is decided. I am also a mezzo/macro level social worker, with practice and collaborations currently focused on developing a framework for conceptualizing multidimensional change in urban housing systems.