Though housing inequality is manifest in a variety of ways around the world, one of the most noteworthy has been the rise of short-term rentals. And while a growing body of literature has ...demonstrated the negative impacts of this new housing typology on cities and neighborhoods, as well as the need for such cities to regulate this phenomenon, scholars have had less to say about how the fights for and against these regulations have actually played out. Through a case study of proposed short-term rental regulations in the small southern college town of Starkville, Mississippi, this paper documents some of the key ways that fights over short-term rental regulation actually play out on the ground, and how these dynamics can lead to more effective approaches to regulating short-term rentals in the future.
The idea of concentrated poverty has long held a prominent place in understandings of racial and class inequality in American cities. While the spatial concentration of the poor is undoubtedly an ...important aspect of this story, concentrated poverty research suffers from a number of conceptual and methodological shortcomings. Through a case study of concentrated poverty and affluence in Lexington, Kentucky, this paper draws on relational socio-spatial theory and critical GIS in order to offer a constructive critique of conventional concentrated poverty research. The paper demonstrates that while concentrated poverty and affluence are both on the rise in recent years, concentrated affluence actually represents a more widespread problem within the city. At the same time, the paper visualizes how these processes are fundamentally interconnected and co-produced through property ownership, where the extraction of rents from areas of concentrated poverty works to simultaneously produce areas of concentrated affluence elsewhere in the city.
A post-truth pandemic? Shelton, Taylor
Big data & society,
09/2020, Volume:
7, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
As the coronavirus pandemic continues apace in the United States, the dizzying amount of data being generated, analyzed and consumed about the virus has led to calls to proclaim this the first ...‘data-driven pandemic’. But at the same time, it seems that this plethora of data has not meant a better grasp on the reality of the pandemic and its effects. Even as we have the potential to digitally track and trace nearly every single individual who has contracted the virus, we have no idea exactly how many people have had the virus, been hospitalized, or died because of it, largely due to a confluence of factors, particularly active obfuscation and mismanagement by public authorities and misinformation spread through social media and right-wing media channels. But beyond these dynamics, there also lies the less nefarious ways that the everyday, subjective practices of data collection, analysis and visualization have the potential to themselves (re)produce these very same dynamics where data is at once valorized and ignored, preeminent and completely useless. That is, the pandemic has revealed only the general inadequacy of our data infrastructures and assemblages to solving pressing social issues, but also the more general shift towards a ‘post-truth’ disposition in contemporary social life. But, as this paper argues, it would be a mistake to see the centrality of data as being somehow the opposite from the larger post-truth apparatus, as the two are instead fundamentally intertwined and co-produced.
•Analyzes two years of geotagged tweets from Louisville, Kentucky.•Explores popular spatial imaginaries of the ‘9th Street Divide’.•Argues for greater linkages between socio-spatial theory and big ...data research.•Develops a novel conceptual and methodological frame for using social media data.
Big data is increasingly seen as a way of providing a more ‘scientific’ approach to the understanding and management of cities. But most geographic analyses of geotagged social media data have failed to mobilize a sufficiently complex understanding of socio-spatial relations. By combining the conceptual approach of relational socio-spatial theory with the methods of critical GIScience, this paper explores the spatial imaginaries and processes of segregation and mobility at play in the notion of the ‘9th Street Divide’ in Louisville, Kentucky. Through a more context-sensitive analysis of this data, this paper argues against this popular spatial imaginary and the notion that the Louisville's West End is somehow separate and apart from the rest of the city. By analyzing the everyday activity spaces of different groups of Louisvillians through geotagged Twitter data, we instead argue for an understanding of these neighborhoods as fluid, porous and actively produced, rather than as rigid, static or fixed. Ultimately, this paper is meant to provide a conceptual and methodological framework for the analysis of social media data that is more attentive to the multiplicity of socio-spatial relations embodied in such data.
Sometimes heralded as the first ever new urbanist development, Starkville, Mississippi's Cotton District neighborhood stands out as a relatively dense, walkable, and mixed-use neighborhood in the ...otherwise car-centric landscapes of the rural south. Together with the neighborhood's colorful buildings reminiscent of the grand homes of the antebellum South, these elements obscure the fact that the neighborhood as it exists today is the result of a federally funded urban renewal project that razed much of the adjacent Black neighborhood of Needmore and opened up the present-day Cotton District as a space for new investment. In excavating the details of these different elements of the Cotton District's history, our central conceit is that the Cotton District represents what we call a "nostalgic neo-plantationist pastiche" produced through the material and symbolic displacement of Blackness and its replacement with both material and symbolic whiteness. By conceptualizing this landscape as constituted fundamentally by white nostalgia for a mythical, bygone era of plantation capitalism, and instantiated through a bricolage of architectural and design styles, we seek to draw attention to the precise ways that this landscape actively (re)constructs the past, rather than simply representing it. At the same time, the case of the Cotton District offers an opportunity to reconsider received wisdom in urban design and planning concerning the historic and contemporary linkages between urban renewal and new urbanism, and racial inequality and urban planning more generally.
This paper explores the variety of ways that emerging sources of (big) data are being used to re-conceptualize the city, and how these understandings of what the urban is shapes the design of ...interventions into it. Drawing on work on the performativity of economics, this paper uses two vignettes of the ‘new urban science’ and municipal vacant property mapping in order to argue that the mobilization of Big Data in the urban context doesn’t necessarily produce a single, greater understanding of the city as it actually is, but rather a highly variegated series of essentialized understandings of the city that render it knowable, governable and intervene-able. Through the construction of new, data-driven urban geographical imaginaries, these projects have opened up the space for urban interventions that work to depoliticize urban injustices and valorize new kinds of technical expertise as the means of going about solving these problems, opening up new possibilities for a remaking of urban space in the image of these sociotechnical paradigms. Ultimately, this paper argues that despite the importance of Big Data, as both a discourse and practice, to emerging forms of urban research and management, there is no singular or universal understanding of the urban that is promoted or developed through the application of these new sources of data, which in turn opens up meaningful possibilities for developing alternative uses of Big Data for understanding and intervening in the city in more emancipatory ways.
New sources of 'big data' are regularly described as revolutionizing the study of urban life. Of particular interest is analyzing gentrification, which has proven a challenging endeavor with ...conventional methods. Big data may offer a new approach to the persistent problem of defining and measuring gentrification, while also allowing us to rethink broader questions about theory and methodology in urban geography. Using geotagged Twitter data, we demonstrate how the changing geographies of users' tweets are proxies for the evolving social and spatial contours of urban neighborhoods. We use the case of Lexington, Kentucky to analyze the mobilities and relational connections of neighborhood residents and visitors as gentrification intensified over time. We argue that these kinds of big data allow for an analytical approach that focuses on the dynamic, relational connections between people and places, and provides a useful, additional avenue in understanding a process as complex and multifaceted as gentrification.
•Examines geotagged tweets in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.•Argues for a mixed methods approach to studying big data.•Uses the TPSN framework to explicitly theorize sociospatial relations of big ...data.•∼30% of geotagged tweets about Sandy in the US were located in the NYC metro area.•Geographies of Twitter are more complex than just places with high concentrations.
Digital social data are now practically ubiquitous, with increasingly large and interconnected databases leading researchers, politicians, and the private sector to focus on how such ‘big data’ can allow potentially unprecedented insights into our world. This paper investigates Twitter activity in the wake of Hurricane Sandy in order to demonstrate the complex relationship between the material world and its digital representations. Through documenting the various spatial patterns of Sandy-related tweeting both within the New York metropolitan region and across the United States, we make a series of broader conceptual and methodological interventions into the nascent geographic literature on big data. Rather than focus on how these massive databases are causing necessary and irreversible shifts in the ways that knowledge is produced, we instead find it more productive to ask how small subsets of big data, especially georeferenced social media information scraped from the internet, can reveal the geographies of a range of social processes and practices. Utilizing both qualitative and quantitative methods, we can uncover broad spatial patterns within this data, as well as understand how this data reflects the lived experiences of the people creating it. We also seek to fill a conceptual lacuna in studies of user-generated geographic information, which have often avoided any explicit theorizing of sociospatial relations, by employing Jessop et al.’s TPSN framework. Through these interventions, we demonstrate that any analysis of user-generated geographic information must take into account the existence of more complex spatialities than the relatively simple spatial ontology implied by latitude and longitude coordinates.
The ownership of rental housing by private equity (PE) companies has been on the rise in the US and abroad in recent decades. PE firms invest funds contributed by institutional and otherwise large ...investors, including pension and sovereign wealth funds. The typical PE playbook is to taker controlling interest in a business, restructure it to increase the appearance of improved financial performance, and resell for a substantial profit. While corporate ownership is sometimes conflated with PE ownership, not all corporate landlords are PE firms. Here, we describe the factors contributing to the rise of PE and REIT ownership in housing, the impact of this trend on poor and working-class communities, and the current organizing that seeks to address it.
This paper outlines the ways in which information technologies (ITs) were used in the Haiti relief effort, especially with respect to web‐based mapping services. Although there were numerous ways in ...which this took place, this paper focuses on four in particular: CrisisCamp Haiti, OpenStreetMap, Ushahidi, and GeoCommons. This analysis demonstrates that ITs were a key means through which individuals could make a tangible difference in the work of relief and aid agencies without actually being physically present in Haiti. While not without problems, this effort nevertheless represents a remarkable example of the power and crowdsourced online mapping and the potential for new avenues of interaction between physically distant places that vary tremendously.
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