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 as leaseholders took ownership (as collateral). Maryland lawmakers responded by passing housing protections in 2007, but several laws were overturned by the courts (Corma 2017). Using census and ground rent administrative data, we map the geography of ground rent in Baltimore. Our results reveal that originally a tool of class dispossession, ground rent became racialized in the 1950s and 1960s and today overwhelmingly affects Black communities and low-income households. Drawing on work by critical Marxist geographers, work on the production of decline, anti-Blackness, and property relations theory, we rely on a critical quantitative framework to illustrate how people, place, power structures, and relationality produce the pernicious and predatory “ground rent machine.” Telling the story of ground rent—a largely underexplored topic—illustrates how local racialized property regimes shape the geography of urban segregation and urban inequality.
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, 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. Centering the goals of community psychology, we aim to identify how existing structural barriers in Baltimore City may be contributing to social injustice through inequitable access to probation services for youth and their families. In this study, we take a novel, interdisciplinary approach to identify 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.
Highlights
A novel, interdisciplinary approach to explore systemic disparities impacting system involved youth.
We use GIS methods to explore structural and spatial barriers that may hinder youth responsivity.
Justice‐involved youth are faced with various spatial and structural barriers to probation services.
The production, perception, and representation of urban space and urban property relations have been urgent "technological" questions since before the birth of urban geography as a discipline. The ...growth and differentiation of cities worldwide has been shaped by a long-evolving technical frontier, one often turned toward the accumulation imperatives and exclusions of private real estate development. Today, real estate in global cities is experiencing a fresh technological boom, featuring novel techniques for real estate mapping, valuation, financialization, and other key functions. This special issue explores and theorizes these technological developments in real estate, past and present. Collected papers articulate urban geographical scholarship with insights from critical political economy and technology studies, including digital geographies. The collection argues that the relational politics of property manifest in crucial ways through the development and application of urban real estate technologies, and that geography and urban planning are well positioned to offer insights into such technological and political economic mediations, both historical and unfolding.
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.
Open innovation, taken from the fields of business strategy and technology development, can offer planners fresh insights into their own practice. Open innovation, like citizen participation, goes ...outside the boundaries of the organization to find solutions to problems and to hand ideas off to partners. A key technique for open innovation is “crowdsourcing,” issuing a challenge to a large and diverse group in hopes of arriving at new solutions more robust than those found inside the organization. The differences between citizen participation and Internet-based crowdsourcing are discussed. Crowdsourcing case studies are provided as a means for extending an emerging literature.
In this paper, we demonstrate that an examination of the socio-environmental impacts of digital ICTs remains a fruitless enterprise without “materializing” digital labour. We suggest one approach to ...materializing digital labour: this first includes 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 with 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 socio-environmental, 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.
This commentary critically engages with Leszczynski and Elwood's conception of the glitch, which is put forth as a way to grapple with digitally mediated spatialities that appear to be mistaken. By ...doing so, they reframe the glitch as a disruptive ‘signal’ of systemic oppression and as productive divergences. We argue for historicizing the glitch/glitch by engaging with feminist marxism, making possible the connection to previous forms of disruption and generative frictions. In response, we apply this approach by connecting the glitch to both witches and the industrial revolution in the home. We suggest epistemological clarity by connecting glitches to the capitalist orientations. We remain positively receptive toward Leszczynski and Elwood's work on the glitch/glitch as a vital endeavor to identify and exploit the spaces of rupture.
•Home gardens are clustered in gentrifying areas of the city's inner core.•Low-income respondents meet more of their produce needs from their gardens.•Highly educated respondents are more likely to ...garden for environmental reasons.•Planners should frame urban agriculture efforts considering diverse motivations.
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 lowincome 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.
Doing Critical GIS Mahmoudi, Dillon; Shelton, Taylor
ACME an international e-journal for critical geographies,
01/2022, Volume:
21, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This special issue emerges from a two-day workshop of the same name, held on April 1st and 2nd, 2019, in Baltimore, Maryland. Inspired by the continued growth and purchase of theories and practices ...of critical mapping, this workshop began from the provocation: "what should the doing of critical GIS look like?" Avoiding any single, universalizing answer to this question, the diversity of contributors to this special issue is mirrored in the diversity of their responses. Through examinations of indigenous, queer, and feminist mapping practices, new theoretical framings for critical mapping and new technologies for producing non-Cartesian maps, and approaches to participatory data collection and mapping (and the limitations thereof), the collected papers each present their own partial perspective on expanding what doing critical GIS can, and ought to, look like. Despite the variety of approaches offered up by the special issue's constituent papers, this introduction frames these contributions through a focus on two general themes that run throughout these papers: (1) the mapping of presences, absences, and relations, and (2) rethinking the processes of mapping. Or, put slightly differently, what we map and how we map. Ultimately, while the papers in this special issue offer a number of different paths forward, there are similarly many paths still untaken when it comes to doing GIS critically, which offer countless opportunities for continued growth in this work moving forward.
PDF
