Category: Papers

The Ground Rent Machine

In Baltimore, Maryland, more than 55,000 homes—roughly 30 percent of all residential plots—are subject to ground rent, a legacy of British feudal property law. Under this landlord–tenant system, the homeowner makes payments to the ground leaseholder, who maintains rights to the land. During the early 2000s, many Baltimoreans fell behind on their ground rent due to recessionary headwinds and were “ejected” from their homes... [continue reading]

National Forgetting in the American South

Using a cultural landscape approach, this study examines all National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) sites in Ouachita Parish, Louisiana, located in the southern United States. The NRHP recognizes sites representative of “our” national heritage by listing them on this registry. From analysis of these records and related archival materials and observations garnered from field visits to select historic sites in the parish, this... [continue reading]

Assessing performance of ZCTA-level and Census Tract-level social and environmental risk factors in a model predicting hospital events

The Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP) strikes again. Using Census Tracts, instead of zip codes (ZCTAs) altered which social determinants of health (SDOH) features were retained during variable selection. [continue reading]

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]