Author: dillonm

Mapping for Whom?

Scholars have shown that communities of color and low-income communities are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, and without intervention, scientists will miss localized events in these neighborhoods and these communities might go unrepresented in rainfall models, further exacerbating the disproportionate impact. [continue reading]

Doing Critical GIS

In 2019, Taylor Shelton and I organized a series of events at Red Emma's Bookstore and Cafe. This paper is the attempts to bring together many of the themes we saw in the presentations. We focus on "what" we map and "how" we map. For example, how might we think about absences and presences on a map? Why is it that, for example, poverty... [continue reading]

Mapping Juvenile Justice

Our findings suggest that there are several barriers facing Baltimore’s justice-involved youth that may impact access to and engagement with juvenile probation. [continue reading]

Political Ecologies of Platform Urbanism

Infrastructure of the built environment affords the collection of data through situated platform services, its circulation through physical ICT infrastructure, and the materials and energy on which this process depends. [continue reading]

Urban Real Estate Technologies

Through this special issue we argue that developing a richer engagement with the role of technology, broadly construed, in reshaping urban property relations is both intellectually significant and politically timely for an engaged urban geography. [continue reading]

Reproducing Spatial Inequality

We explore how the language of “just sustainability” may become subsumed into a sustainability fix strategy, depoliticizing the utility of concepts such as justice and/or equity. Building from critical GIS insights,we combine digitized spatial data from participatory mapping exercises and community-organization-based focus group in Portland, Oregon, regarding a proposed six-mile biking and walking path around downtown. We find that 80 percent of participants’ typical... [continue reading]

Critical Geographic Information Science (GIS)

Critical GIS combines the technical field of geographic information science (GIS) with heterodox social theory. [continue reading]

Silicon Forest and Server Farms

What inequities are arising in the uneven development of data infrastructures within and beyond cities? How might we extend analyses of data centers and data infrastructures to understand the relationship between computing and socio-natural change? And how might these mappings elucidate new areas for contestation and resistance? What are the possibilities for more sustainable and equitable alternatives in digital economies? This essay perhaps raises... [continue reading]

Revisiting Critical GIS

Researchers met at the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Laboratories to revisit the spirit of ‘critical GIS’ in approaching questions both emerging and enduring around the intersection of the spatial and the digital. [continue reading]

Data Colonialism Through Accumulation by Dispossession

In this article, we parse a variety of big data definitions to argue that it is only when individual datums by the million, billion, or more are linked together algorithmically that ‘big data’ emerges as a commodity. Such decisions do not occur in a vacuum but as part of an asymmetric power relationship in which individuals are dispossessed of the data they generate in... [continue reading]