Author: dillonm
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]
Socio-spatial Differentiation in the Sustainable City
As cities take center stage in developing and brokering strategies for sustainability, examining the uneven distribution of green infrastructure is crucial. Urban agriculture (UA) has gained a prominent role in urban greening and food system diversification strategies alike. Despite that it is the preeminent form of food production in North American cities, residential gardening has received little scholarly attention. Moreover, research on the intra-urban... [continue reading]
Beyond the Screen
We introduce the literature on cognitive-cultural capitalism and third-wave urbanization as markers of contemporary capitalism, producing uneven socio-spatial arrangements across the global-urban system. Synthesis of media and communication studies and political economies of urbanization suggests that both capital accumulation and the social lives of (planetary) urban residents are increasingly mediated and structured by online, digital ICT platforms. We show that digital ICTs are sophisticated... [continue reading]
The Neoliberal Politics of “Smart”
This article investigates how digital technologies in the energy sector are enabling increased value extraction in the cycle of capital accumulation through surveillant processes of everyday energy consumption. We offer critical theory (Gramsci, Foucault) and critical political economy (Marx) as a guide for critical understanding of value creation in ICT through quotidian processes and practices of social reproduction. In this regard, the concept of... [continue reading]