Dillon Mahmoudi

University of Maryland, Baltimore County | UMBC · Department of Geography and Environmental Systems

Problem, research strategy, and findings: In recent years, some economists and urban development advocates have argued that historic preservation is fundamentally at odds with a growing, diverse economy. We supply empirical support for Jane Jacobs's (1961) seminal argument about the value of “plain, ordinary, low-value old buildings,” finding that...

In recent years, much has been written on ‘big data’ in both the popular and academic press. After the hubristic declaration of the ‘end of theory’ more nuanced arguments have emerged, suggesting that increasingly pervasive data collection and quantification may have significant implications for the social sciences, even if the social, scientific,...

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...

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 “crowd...

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 America...

Citizen science harnesses the power of nonscientist observations, often resulting in a vast network of data. Such projects have potential to democratize science by involving the public. Yet participants are mostly white, affluent, and well-educated, participants that contribute data from their residence or places they frequent. The geography of the...

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,...

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 imperative...

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, Orego...

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 m...

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...

This article investigates how digital technologies in the energy sector are enabling increased value extraction in the cycle of capital accumulation through surveillant processes of everyday energy consumption. We offer critical theory (Gramsci, Foucault) and critical political economy (Marx) as a guide for critical understanding of value creation...

Citizen participation has four main purposes in the planning process: data/information gathering, legitimization, empowerment/ethics (those affected should have a hand in the planning), and resilience (the future is unknowable so to cope with the uncertainty of the future, we need many views and visions to build in robustness). Understanding more a...