This article draws on an ethnographic approach to concrete institutional practices and machine learning algorithms to analyse emergent proactive state geographies in London’s suburbs, assessing predictive modelling in housing enforcement in respect of the government of migrant housing precarity in the interstices of rentier and racial capitalism.

We argue that the urban institutional landscape constantly generates new promises as way of anticipation, which in turn allows residents to write themselves into select urban operations. This article engages two central districts in Rio de Janeiro and Jakarta to explore how residents “stand by” the promise, not of passive waiting, but as maneuvers of either staying tuned to or as way of tactical detachment from the multiple trajectories which have been conjured up in the here and now.

Recent scholarship on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict explicitly problematized this approach and resisted the subsumption of Gaza city into the larger geopolitical unit of the eponymous Strip. This article contributes to this new body of critical work by addressing the dispossessory dynamics stitched into Gaza’s urban fabric through an episode from its urban and architectural history.

Using the mass transit planning process in Addis Ababa as a point of entry, we trace how the city’s transformation is negotiated at the intersection of local agency, the Ethiopian national political setting and international networks. This relational mobilisation perspective arguably infuses hope into the debate, because it opens new ways of identifying seemingly insignificant actions and actors elsewhere and recognising them as potential drivers of change.

In this article, I draw from 24 months of ethnography with subvertisers to suggest that a particular ideal of public space, that of a ‘regime of order’, is folded into the hegemonic spatial management of urban communication by advertising actors.