I’m an urban and economic geographer that researches cities, technology, and uneven development. I serve as Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where I’m also Affiliate Faculty in the School of Public Policy and the Department of Economics, and a Faculty Fellow at the Hilltop Institute. I currently chair the Urban Geography Specialty Group of the AAG and serve on the editorial boards of Urban Geography and Big Data & Society.
For the academic year 2024-2025, I am Professeur invité (Visiting Professor) at the Centre Urbanisation Culture Société at the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique in Montréal.
My research maps the faultlines of digital capitalism — tracing how infrastructures like data centers, algorithms, and smart city technologies reproduce inequality and reorganize space. I draw from heterodox political economics, critical GIS, and feminist and anti-racist theory to understand how capital inscribes itself in code, land, and labor. Whether through analyzing software work, critiquing classificatory algorithms, or examining AI’s footprint, I approach the digital not as abstract or virtual, but as deeply material and political. Under the theme mapping capital, I explore how presence and absence — in data, infrastructure, and urban form — reveal the spatial strategies of racial capitalism. This becomes a method for identifying what’s made visible, what’s obscured, and what’s at stake in the reordering of everyday life.
For a recent reflection on this approach, see my co-authored piece on Doing Critical GIS with Taylor Shelton.
Recent Publications
Uneven development and the anti-politics machine: Algorithmic violence and market-based neighborhood rankings. 2025. Political Geography 116 (January): 103247. With Dena Aufseeser and Alicia Sabatino. doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103247.
The urban-tech feedback loop: A surveillance and development data-walk in South Lake Union. 2024. Digital Geography & Society 7 (December): 100106. With Anthony Levenda and Alicia Sabatino. doi: 10.1016/j.diggeo.2024.100106.
Featured on The Data Fix podcast w/ Dr. Mél Hogan
Meme Summary
From FOSS to profit: Digital spatial technologies and the mode of production. 2024. Digital Geography and Society 7 (December): 100101. With Jim Thatcher, Laura Beltz Imaoka, and David O’Sullivan. doi:10.1016/j.diggeo.2024.100101.
Interrogating Narratives of Urban Change: Disinvestment and Development in Two Neighborhoods in Baltimore, MD. Urban Geography 46 (3): 589-611. With Dena Aufseeser. doi:10.1080/02723638.2024.2376907.
The Ground Rent Machine: The Story of Race, Housing Inequality, and Dispossession in Baltimore, Maryland. 2024. Annals of the American Association of Geographers (114) 7: 1505-1525. With Jason Jurjevich. doi:10.1080/24694452.2024.2353172. Annals of the AAG open access
L’entrepôt Amazon [The Amazon Warehouse]. 2024. In Nos lieux communs: Une géographie du monde contemporain, edited by Fabrice Argounès, Michel Bussi, and Martine Drozdz, Illustrated édition. Paris: Fayard. With Alan Wiig. EAN 9782213725147

Most Cited
Socio-spatial differentiation in the Sustainable City: A mixed-methods assessment of residential gardens in metropolitan Portland, Oregon, USA. 2016. Landscape and Urban Planning 148 (April): 1-16. With Nathan McClintock, Michael Simpson, and Jacinto Pereira Santos. doi:10.1016/j.landurbplan.2015
Data Colonialism through Accumulation by Dispossession: New metaphors for daily data. 2016. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34 (6): 990–1006. With Jim Thatcher and David O’Sullivan. doi:10.1177/0263775816633195
Selected Favorites
Political Ecologies of Platform Urbanism: Digital labor and data infrastructures. 2020. Book Chapter in “Urban Platforms and the Future City: Transformations in Infrastructure, Governance, Knowledge and Everyday Life,” ed. Mike Hodson, Julia Kasmire, Andrew McMeekin, John G. Stehlin, and Kevin Ward. Routledge. With Anthony M Levenda and John G Stehlin. ISBN 9780429319754
Silicon Forest and Server Farms: The (Urban) Nature of Digital Capitalism in the Pacific Northwest. 2019. Culture Machine 18: 1-14. With Anthony M Levenda. MDSoar CultureMachine.net