Tag: urban geography

Mapping Juvenile Justice

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Identifying Existing Structural Barriers to Accessing Probation Services

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Fountain, Erika and Dillon Mahmoudi. 2021. “Mapping Juvenile Justice: Identifying Existing Structural Barriers to Accessing Probation Services.” American Journal of Community Psychology 67 (1-2): 116-129. doi:10.1002/ajcp.12474

Summary

This paper was part of a special issue in the American Journal of Community Psychology which explicitly sought to engage in interdisciplinary approaches to community psychology. Our paper incorporates insights from human geography and GIS to identify the landscape of mobility for justice-involved youth in Baltimore. We argue that practitioners and lawmakers need to think spatially about uneven development to reduce the number of justice-involved youth that end up in prison because they could not get to court-mandated Department of Juvenile Services locations.

The majority of justice-involved youth are placed on probation; however, many of those same youth struggle to comply with probation requirements and are subsequently confined. In Baltimore, a full 20% of newly committed youth were detained for violations of probation. While there are various reasons youth fail to comply with probation requirements, there have been recent calls to consider the impact of structural and spatial barriers to accessing probation programs and services. In this study, we take a novel, interdisciplinary approach to identifying structural or spatial barriers facing justice-involved youth in Baltimore, MD. Specifically, we explore transportation barriers (i.e., vehicle access) and spatial disparities between youth residences and probation office locations. Our findings suggest that there are several barriers facing Baltimore’s justice-involved youth that may impact access to and engagement with juvenile probation. Specifically, we found that 1 in 3 youths reside in areas with extremely low levels of vehicle access and where the median household income is 25% below the city median. We also find that the majority of youth live beyond walking distances; many would require lengthy transit commutes. These findings highlight the structural and spatial barriers facing justice-involved youth that may impact access to and engagement with probation services.

Our findings indicate there are various spatial and structural barriers that justice-involved youth in Baltimore City face. First, a majority of youth live in areas marked by concentrated poverty and where many residents do not have access to a vehicle. About a third of the youth sampled live in areas marked by the most disadvantage; these youth live in areas where the median household income falls 30% below the Baltimore City median household income, and where between 30 and 70% of workers do not have access to a vehicle. Furthermore, almost all of these youth live beyond walking distance from DJS probation locations, effectively requiring them to use public transit or costly alternatives to attend regular meetings with their probation officer.

Household income, redlining, car access and the residence locations of justice involved youth.
Walking and bus travel times from Department of Juvenile Services locations in Baltimore for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, and 40 minutes. The majority of youth (78%) live outside of walking distance (more than 20-min) from DJS and in areas marked by low to extremely low car access,

Political Ecologies of Platform Urbanism

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Digital labor and data infrastructures

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Mahmoudi, Dillon, Anthony M Levenda, and John G. Stehlin. 2020. “Political Ecologies of Platform Urbanism: Digital Labor and Data Infrastructures.” In Urban Platforms and the Future City: Transformations in Infrastructure, Governance, Knowledge and Everyday Life, edited by Mike Hodson, Julia Kasmire, Andrew McMeekin, John G. Stehlin, and Kevin Ward, 1st Edition, 40–52. New York: Routledge. Routledge link

Summary

This chapter with Anthony and John was a chance to revisit our Beyond the Screen paper in tripleC and reformulate data collection in the built environment with particular attention to labor and the platform economy. One of our contributions is to connect deskilled platform labor with the programmers who make the platforms. Our approach builds from digital political ecology (DPE) to understand the physical infrastructures and digital components of platform urbanism. In this chapter, we combine insights from more recent scholarship on the city and digital geography to examine the infrastructures that undergird platform urbanism to understand how a new division of labor (re)inscribes social disparities in the uneven geographies of the city and its hinterland.

the Uber platform forms a hinge between the urban built environment and the physical infrastructure of data circulation on the one hand and between dead labor embedded in algorithm production and the living but deskilled labor of driving on the other. The output of this function is not just a mobility service but also increasingly valuable data “fumes” (Thatcher, 2014). Scholars, therefore, must question how the data is being transmitted, where it is stored and copied, who has access to it, and how it is used to create or add to an advertising profile. Equally, they must ask about the division of labor involved in producing the platform itself: who uses this data to provide a service under what conditions of deskilling, automation, or punitive “reskilling” and who programmed the platform architecture that structures this labor process … 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.

Urban Real Estate Technologies

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Genealogies, frontiers, and critiques

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Payne, Will, Sarah Knuth, and Dillon Mahmoudi. 2020. “Urban Real Estate Technologies: Genealogies, Frontiers, and Critiques.” Urban Geography 41 (8): 1033–36. doi:10.1080/02723638.2020.1820678

Overview

This is the special issue introduction to Urban Geography (Volume 41, Issue 8, 2020) on Real Estate Technologies organized with Will Payne and Sarah Knuth. The papers in this special issue of Urban Geography began in the material first presented for the “Real Estate Technologies” sessions at the 2017 American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting. This collection argues that the politics of property manifest in crucial ways through the development and use of urban real estate technologies and that geographers and urban planners are well positioned to offer insights into such technological and political economic mediations, past and present. Organizing questions ask how technologies developed and used for urban real estate: 1) reorder existing exchange practices, spaces, and relationships; 2) capture or create accumulation frontiers; and 3) render property technical, quantifiable, and governable.

Through this collective intervention, 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. We suggest that all too often, novel players and techniques in urban space aggressively claim the mantle of the innovative and technological, “rendering technical” (Li, 2007) and technocratic broader urban problems and contestations and removing them from democratic disputation.

The issue had phenomenal contributions:

Dalton, Craig M. 2020. “Rhizomatic Data Assemblages: Mapping New Possibilities for Urban Housing Data.” Urban Geography 41 (8): 1090–1108. doi:10.1080/02723638.2019.1645553.

Shatan, Nicholas, and Kathe Newman. 2020. “The State Market Relationship as a Real Estate Technology: FHA Multifamily Development and Preservation, 1934 – Present.” Urban Geography 41 (8): 1065–89. doi:10.1080/02723638.2019.1670571.

Shaw, Joe. 2020. “Platform Real Estate: Theory and Practice of New Urban Real Estate Markets.” Urban Geography 41 (8): 1037–64. doi:10.1080/02723638.2018.1524653.

Reproducing Spatial Inequality

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The sustainability fix and barriers to urban mobility in Portland, Oregon

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Mahmoudi, Dillon, Amy Lubitow, and MacKenzie A. Christensen. 2020. “Reproducing spatial inequality? The sustainability fix and barriers to urban mobility in Portland, Oregon.” Urban Geography 41(6), 801–822. doi:10.1080/02723638.2019.1698865

Summary

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 travel destinations are outside of downtown Portland and that participants experience planning and sustainability in a highly localized manner, challenging the equity rationale of downtown investment. We argue the top-down planning model, which presumes that the spatial diffusion of benefits is equitable, is inherently ahistorical and fails to benefit those in historically marginalized neighborhoods. Finally, we argue for the value of community-oriented research, which, in this case, inspired a coalition of community organizations to formally oppose a city-led project based on the inequitable distribution of infrastructure benefits.

We show how development based on a sustainability fix hinders an equity evaluation whose primary metric is access to central city amenities, where “access” is perceived to be a mechanism that serves traditionally marginalized populations. The uneven spatial structure of the city instead reveals that wealthier, white central city residents have much higher rates of access to the proposed project than those connected to the project later through bike and pathway development.

When asked about their typical travel concerning the central city, participants either didn’t want to travel downtown or found that there were barriers to doing so. Traveling to and from the central city was not of immediate interest for a clear majority of our participants, despite the Green Loop project’s goals of creating infrastructure that would serve a large share of Portland residents. As one participant put it:

And the reality is that a lot of people who now live here don’t or can’t work downtown because toward downtown requires higher education. And it requires you being in very specific industries . . . a lot of folks are working in blue-collar industries . . . So a lot of our folks who live here, downtown isn’t where people are going to work.

Silicon Forest and Server Farms

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The (Urban) Nature of Digital Capitalism in the Pacific Northwest

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Levenda, Anthony and Dillon Mahmoudi. 2019. “Silicon Forest and Server Farms: The (Urban) Nature of Digital Capitalism in the Pacific Northwest.” Culture Machine 18: 1-14. MDSoar CultureMachine.net

Summary

We trace some of connections, displacements, and inequalities that are found along data infrastructures. If we follow from data centers in rural communities to smart cities produced in the image of large corporations, we find extractive logics all along the way. Choosing data centers and infrastructures as the site for investigation of the relationship between digital capitalism and nature is strategic. It reveals a complex relationship between urbanization as a planetary scale process linking urban and rural communities, facilitating flows of nature (energy, water, food, waste, etc.) in circulations and metabolisms that reproduce digital capitalism. In the first section, we showed how nature is constructed as both a resource and a greenwashing strategy for data centers. Then, we turned towards the metaphor of layering to understand how data infrastructures are a specific expression of digital capitalism’s secondary circuit at this historical-geographical moment. Growth in data infrastructures, as an expression of digital capitalism’s secondary circuit of fixed capital, is driven by the logic of exploitation of social production through digital means. Everyday life, subjectivity, and social knowledge become reduced to data resources for extraction by digital capitalists. This is the basis of third-wave urbanization, which we discussed in the third section, highlighting how this mode of capital accumulation is leading to new fractures and inequalities in cities like Seattle.

But there is still so much more to do. 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 more questions than it answers, but our goal here is to provoke critical reflection on the interconnections between nature, urbanization, and computation. After all, paraphrasing Marx, nature builds no data centers.

Socio-spatial Differentiation in the Sustainable City

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A mixed-methods assessment of residential gardens in metropolitan Portland, Oregon, USA

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McClintock, Nathan, Dillon Mahmoudi, Michael Simpson, and Jacinto Pereira Santos. 2016. “Socio-Spatial Differentiation in the Sustainable City: A Mixed-Methods Assessment of Residential Gardens in Metropolitan Portland, Oregon, USA.” Landscape and Urban Planning 148 (April): 1–16. doi:10.1080/01944363.2015.1135072

See other related articles on Nathan McClintock’s website.

Summary

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 variability of home gardens is sparse. In this paper, we use a mixed-methods approach to assess the scale and scope of residential gardens in Portland, Oregon, a metropolitan region renowned for its innovations in sustainability. Using a combination of mapping, spatial regression, and a mail survey, we compare residential UA and the characteristics and motivations of gardeners in two socioeconomically differentiated areas of Portland and one of its major suburbs. Results demonstrate that engagement in UA is differentiated along both spatial and socioeconomic lines, with more educated respondents engaging for environmental reasons and more low-income respondents relying on their gardens for food security. We contextualize our findings within broader urban processes, e.g. reinvestment in the urban core and displacement of poverty to the periphery.

For policymakers, our results suggest the need for sustainability messaging that is sensitive to a variety of motivations and that resonates with a diverse population. For a city to reach a broader population, it may need to reframe its sustainability goals in new ways, while attending to the structural constraints to food access that cannot be resolved through local food production alone.

Beyond the Screen

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Uneven Geographies, Digital Labour, and the City of Cognitive-Cultural Capitalism

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Mahmoudi, Dillon, and Anthony M. Levenda. “Beyond the Screen: Uneven Geographies, Digital Labour, and the City of Cognitive-Cultural Capitalism.” 2016. tripleC: Communication, Capital and Critique 14 (1): 99-120. With Anthony M Levenda. doi:10.31269/triplec.v14i1.699

Summary

In this paper, we demonstrate that an examination of the socio-environmental impacts of digital Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) remains a fruitless enterprise without “materializing” digital labour. We suggest a two-part approach to materializing digital labour: first, connecting political economic analyses of digital ICTs to the co-evolution and geography of planetary urbanization and technological change, and second, examining the relationships between immaterial, digital labour and the material industrial production system. In the context of broad changes in technology, social life, and urbanization, many scholars have theorized a shift towards a third phase of capitalism, beyond mercantilism and industrialism, based in immaterial, digital, and cognitive labour. 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 manipulations of nature that require and illuminate new ways of thinking about digital labour, and more broadly, of immaterial labour. We suggest that the immaterial labour associated with digital ICTs is actually material labour responsible for increasing the velocity of capital circulation, as a moment of production and an appendage of the growing complexity of third-phase capitalist industry and urbanization. The materiality of cognitive, cultural, and symbolic labour reaches beyond the city, invades the lifeworlds of a planet of urban residents, and excretes concrete, silicon, bits, servers, and energy waste producing an urban landscape beyond the city. Through an examination of data centres, we show the necessary relationship between the third-wave urbanization and its planetary reach into rural, pristine Oregon. Data centres in Oregon and the broader Pacific Northwest highlight the uneven geography of “clean” digital labour focused in large urban technopoles; the potentially harmful, material, and socioenvironmental impacts of data centres in rural areas; and the necessary and dialectic relationship between the two for cognitive-cultural capitalism. We argue that third-wave urbanization, and the concurrent and co-produced technological advancement in digital ICTs and digital ICT infrastructure, creates the conditions for capital’s subsumption of cognitive and cultural labour.