This paper explores how two major location-based services in the United States, Yelp and Google Maps, use volunteer top-contributor programmes to ensure access to reliable spatial data. Through the ...Elite Squad programme, paid Yelp staff take an active curatorial role growing the company's reviewer base in select urban regions in North America. Google's Local Guides programme uses an extensive, self-service model to collect data on a global scale. Both companies enrol and motivate users in ways that present unpaid review labour as affirming, with emphases that reflect their scalar strategies: Yelp stressing tight-knit sociality and Google global altruism.
Public-private transportation megaprojects such as toll roads and rail networks have received attention as expressions of neoliberal urban development processes, but what we call "mesoscale" mobility ...infrastructures have become increasingly common in the United States. Such infrastructures are large enough to have systemic qualities (e.g., fixed nodes, instrumented networks, and operational requirements) and complex institutional arrangements but small enough in cost and impact that they do not systemically transform urbanization patterns. In this article, we analyze one such mesoscale infrastructure system, bicycle sharing, across three urban regions in the United States: Austin, Texas, Philadelphia, and the San Francisco Bay Area. We argue that bicycle sharing systems in the United States have three key features: (1) widespread expectations of fiscal self-sufficiency restrict their geographical reach to urban centers; (2) they largely follow existing patterns of racialized uneven development, leading to major service gaps; and (3) their implementation involves contingent institutional configurations that create modest openings for steering them in more equitable directions. At the same time, newer venture capital-funded "dockless" competitors have exploited the coverage gaps of station-based bike sharing without departing from their basic market-driven logic. Mesoscale infrastructural experimentation is increasingly central to efforts to increase mobility options in the United States but, when implemented within existing urban political economies, tends to produce scales of infrastructure that are at odds with more substantive forms of mobility justice.
Local Landscapes of Assisted Housing Deitz, Shiloh; Payne, Will B.; Seymour, Eric ...
Cityscape (Washington, D.C.),
01/2024, Volume:
26, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Understanding the stock of rental housing affordable to lower-income households is a crucial task for local governments aiming to meet rising demand and inform policy priorities. However, enumerating ...the number of units with public housing, Project Based Section 8, and Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) assistance and identifying precisely where those units are located is deceptively challenging. Although federal datasets with that information are easily accessible, development and building location information may be unavailable or imprecise. Critically, identifying units that receive more than one form of assistance is hard, especially units with LIHTC. To address these challenges in New Jersey, the authors developed a largely automated and replicable process for precisely placing subsidized housing units into tax parcels. Doing so enables linking units across federal programs and with state and local data and to more accurately aggregate counts to integrate with decennial census and American Community Survey (ACS) data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Within New Jersey, the research team re-geocoded records in three datasets using two commercial geocoding services, assigned them confidence scores, designated records for manual handling, and then assigned them to parcels. Following those steps, they identified more than 15,000 units statewide with overlapping federal subsidies, which would lead to a 12-percent overcount of subsidized units in the state if the three datasets were used as given (and up to a 40-percent overcount in individual municipalities). By reusing and reconciling those datasets at the parcel level, researchers can more accurately enumerate rental units associated with different levels of subsidy depth and duration, a crucial task for identifying housing needs within and beyond the assisted rental stock.
When a City Isn’t a City Payne, Will B.; Nolan, Lauren E.; Seymour, Eric
Cityscape (Washington, D.C.),
01/2023, Volume:
25, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The authors have developed a primarily automated process to take the “city”-level dataset from the Picture of Subsidized Households (PSH), which corresponds to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Populated ...Place Areas, and reassemble it at the scale of a state’s municipalities. Municipalities are the relevant scale of governance for many critical issues that have outsize local and regional impacts on housing affordability and residential segregation, like zoning and rent control. This article and accompanying R code (https://github.com/willbpayne/NJSOARH/) outlines the reasons that transforming the spatial scale of PSH data may be necessary, and the steps the authors took to synthesize it into the county subdivision level in New Jersey. This effort was done to allow U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) data users to adapt this process to their needs and better understand the correspondence between municipal-level policies and housing goals and outcomes.
The rapid rise of digital platform-based transportation services over the past decade has begun to transform urban mobility. Fleets of dockless bicycles and scooters – or ‘micromobility’– represent ...the newest horizon of investment, particularly in the United States. Micromobility platforms launch rapidly, with minimal public planning or funding and no fixed infrastructure, using inexpensive, GPS-connected vehicles stored in public space. These platforms represent a deepening of the neoliberalisation of transport, in which infrastructural properties emerge biopolitically from the dynamics of private platforms. This article examines public debates over the regulation of micromobility platforms in Austin, Texas, in early 2018. Drawing on interviews with city officials and bikesharing professionals, observation of public meetings and GIS analysis of usage data, we argue that conflicts we observed over new micromobility platforms – specifically ‘clutter’, equity in geographic coverage and data privacy – obscured the deeper political economy of platformisation and the austerity that limited the effectiveness of the existing public station-based bikeshare system. In Austin, the search for ‘innovative’ micromobility transportation at no public cost resulted in the further erosion of the underfunded public system. We argue that despite their flexible, low-carbon image, existing micromobility platforms in the United States largely exploit rather than address inadequacies of urban transport.
When mapping relationships across multiple spatial scales, prevailing visualization techniques treat every mile of distance equally, which may not be appropriate for studying phenomena with long-tail ...distributions of distances from a common point of reference (e.g., retail customer locations, remittance flows, and migration data). While quantitative geography has long acknowledged that non-Cartesian spaces and distances are often more appropriate for analyzing and visualizing real-world data and complex spatial phenomena, commonly available GIS software solutions make working with non-linear distances extremely difficult. Our Relational Reprojection Platform (RRP) fills this gap with a simple stereographic projection engine centering any given data point to the rest of the set, and transforming great circle distances from this point to the other locations using a set of broadly applicable non-linear functions as options. This method of reprojecting data allows users to quickly and easily explore how non-linear distance transformations (including square root and logarithmic reprojections) reveal more complex spatial patterns within datasets than standard projections allow. Our initial release allows users to upload comma separated value (CSV) files with geographic coordinates and data columns and minimal cleaning and explore a variety of spatial transformations of their data. We hope this heuristic tool will enhance the exploratory stages of social research using spatial data.
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.
The Quality-of-Care Network (QCN) was conceptualized by the World Health Organization (WHO) and other global partners to facilitate learning on and improve quality of care for maternal and newborn ...health within and across low and middle-income countries. However, there was significant variance in the speed and extent to which QCN formed in the involved countries. This paper investigates the factors that shaped QCN’s differential emergence in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Malawi, and Uganda. Drawing on network scholarship, we conducted a replicated case study of the four country cases and triangulated several sources of data, including a document review, observations of national-level and district level meetings, and key informant interviews in each country and at the global level. Thematic coding was performed in NVivo 12. We find that QCN emerged most quickly and robustly in Bangladesh, followed by Ethiopia, then Uganda, and slowest and with least institutionalization in Malawi. Factors connected to the policy environment and network features explained variance in network emergence. With respect to the policy environment, pre-existing resources and initiatives dedicated to maternal and newborn health and quality improvement, strong data and health system capacity, and national commitment to advancing on synergistic goals were crucial drivers to QCN’s emergence. With respect to the features of the network itself, the embedding of QCN leadership in powerful agencies with pre-existing coordination structures and trusting relationships with key stakeholders, inclusive network membership, and effective individual national and local leadership were also crucial in explaining QCN’s speed and quality of emergence across countries. Studying QCN emergence provides critical insights as to why well-intentioned top-down global health networks may not materialize in some country contexts and have relatively quick uptake in others, and has implications for a network’s perceived legitimacy and ultimate effectiveness in producing stated objectives.
Created by New York lawyers Tim and Nina Zagat in 1979, the Zagat Restaurant Survey brought computer-powered statistical methods and an avowedly egalitarian ideology to restaurant criticism. The ...Zagats synthesized numerical ratings and narrative reviews from amateur food lovers into paragraph-length listings, eventually selling millions of slim burgundy guidebooks annually for cities around the Global North. The Survey allowed a classed cohort of power users to shape urban environments with their collective judgments, meeting a widespread desire for more extensive information on upscale consumption spaces as the rhythms of professional and social life were changing drastically for highly educated workers. The Zagat Survey was both a class strategy by an emerging professional cohort to assert their dominance over the cultural and built environment in New York City, and a prototypical location-based service (LBS), pioneering many of the features assumed to be inherent to Web 2.0 networked applications.
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