Will B Payne
Biographic Data
| ID | 1340463 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Will B Payne |
| GIVEN NAMES | Will B |
| FAMILY NAME | Payne |
| SIGNATURE | PAYNE W B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2223-7864 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 34 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The pointillistic city , by Daniel O’Brien: Boston, MIT Press, 2025
The Section 8 (F)influencer economy
The Housing Choice Voucher (HCV, colloquially known as “Section 8” vouchers) program is one of the largest affordable housing programs in the United States, providing private market rental subsidies to millions of Americans annually. Over the past several years, a number of financial influencers have built large followings on social media by offering real estate investment advice focused on renting property to HCV holders. Influencers like Sectio…
Expanding the city digital twin in the context of crisis, cartography and computation
This commentary responds to Gillian Rose's ‘Visualising human life in volumetric cities: city digital twins and other disasters’ as a framework for thinking about crisis and visual cultures in digital twinning practices. It frames Rose's analysis as a specific intervention into the visual and cultural relationship between filmic depictions of disaster and catastrophe replicated through white and masculinist imaginaries of the ordered rational cit…
Digital Twin or Digital Kin: Misunderstandings and Myths about Urban Simulation, and Directions for Change
Using three case studies from the United States and Australia, this article explores the conditions required to make urban digital twin projects successful, considering a traditional urban digital twins (UDT) project and National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded 3D gaming digital twins in New York and a large-scale federated UDT platform in New South Wales (NSW) Australia. The authors argue that questions around interoperability and profit and ten…
From the urban factory to the metaverse: Understanding datafication, spatial computing and digital twinning practices
This article considers digital twins and digital twinning practices in relation to the spaces of the factory, city, and the “metaverse.” We draw on the work of urban and new media theorists to argue that digital twins are part of a long history of urban media and computation. Expanding on Walter Benjamin’s notion of phantasmagoria, we argue that the logics of the factory inherent in early digital twins are intensified and expanded in the more rec…
Mapping elite tastes along New York City's gourmet gentrification frontier, 1990-2015
Urban researchers have long considered the spread of upscale amenities like restaurants, cafes and bars to be important symbolic indicators of gentrification, and recent scholarship has shown that increases in upscale consumption amenities are positively associated with rising rents and demographic changes. This article builds on research in urban and economic geography to consider the role of changing informational networks about consumption bus…
Relational Reprojection Platform: Non-linear distance transformations of spatial data in R
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…
Disposable infrastructures: ‘Micromobility’ platforms and the political economy of transport disruption in Austin, Texas
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 pl…
Mesoscale Infrastructures and Uneven Development: Bicycle Sharing Systems in the United States as "Already Splintered" Urbanism
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…
Powering the local review engine at Yelp and Google: Intensive and extensive approaches to crowdsourcing spatial data
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.…
Urban real estate technologies: Genealogies, frontiers, & critiques
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 experien…
Exploding the Phone Book: Spatial Data Arbitrage in the 1990s Internet Boom
This article examines 1990s Internet firm Zip2 as an early case study in the political economy of location-based services (LBS) and “smart” cities in the United States. Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s first startup, Zip2, combined digital maps built using public spatial data with computerized Yellow Pages listings to create city directory Web portals for daily newspapers. Examining the technical affordances, labor practices, and revenue models of the compa…
Leighton Evans and Michael Saker, Location-based social media: Space, time and identity
Revisiting critical GIS
The article looks into the critical geographic information science (GIS) in approaching questions both emerging and enduring around the intersection of the spatial and the digital. It offers trading zones for discussion of issues, for building alliances and interrogating tensions, and for a constant dialectical process of critique and renewal. One tension running through critical GIS is the contradictory role it has played in addressing questions…
Revisiting critical GIS
The article looks into the critical geographic information science (GIS) in approaching questions both emerging and enduring around the intersection of the spatial and the digital. It offers trading zones for discussion of issues, for building alliances and interrogating tensions, and for a constant dialectical process of critique and renewal. One tension running through critical GIS is the contradictory role it has played in addressing questions…
Powering the local review engine at Yelp and Google: Intensive and extensive approaches to crowdsourcing spatial data
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.…
Disposable infrastructures: ‘Micromobility’ platforms and the political economy of transport disruption in Austin, Texas
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 pl…
Mesoscale Infrastructures and Uneven Development: Bicycle Sharing Systems in the United States as "Already Splintered" Urbanism
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…
Urban real estate technologies: Genealogies, frontiers, & critiques
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 experien…
Digital Twin or Digital Kin: Misunderstandings and Myths about Urban Simulation, and Directions for Change
Using three case studies from the United States and Australia, this article explores the conditions required to make urban digital twin projects successful, considering a traditional urban digital twins (UDT) project and National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded 3D gaming digital twins in New York and a large-scale federated UDT platform in New South Wales (NSW) Australia. The authors argue that questions around interoperability and profit and ten…
From the urban factory to the metaverse: Understanding datafication, spatial computing and digital twinning practices
This article considers digital twins and digital twinning practices in relation to the spaces of the factory, city, and the “metaverse.” We draw on the work of urban and new media theorists to argue that digital twins are part of a long history of urban media and computation. Expanding on Walter Benjamin’s notion of phantasmagoria, we argue that the logics of the factory inherent in early digital twins are intensified and expanded in the more rec…
Revisiting critical GIS
The article looks into the critical geographic information science (GIS) in approaching questions both emerging and enduring around the intersection of the spatial and the digital. It offers trading zones for discussion of issues, for building alliances and interrogating tensions, and for a constant dialectical process of critique and renewal. One tension running through critical GIS is the contradictory role it has played in addressing questions…
Leighton Evans and Michael Saker, Location-based social media: Space, time and identity
Urban real estate technologies: Genealogies, frontiers, & critiques
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 experien…
Exploding the Phone Book: Spatial Data Arbitrage in the 1990s Internet Boom
This article examines 1990s Internet firm Zip2 as an early case study in the political economy of location-based services (LBS) and “smart” cities in the United States. Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s first startup, Zip2, combined digital maps built using public spatial data with computerized Yellow Pages listings to create city directory Web portals for daily newspapers. Examining the technical affordances, labor practices, and revenue models of the compa…
Powering the local review engine at Yelp and Google: Intensive and extensive approaches to crowdsourcing spatial data
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.…
Mesoscale Infrastructures and Uneven Development: Bicycle Sharing Systems in the United States as "Already Splintered" Urbanism
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…
Disposable infrastructures: ‘Micromobility’ platforms and the political economy of transport disruption in Austin, Texas
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 pl…
Relational Reprojection Platform: Non-linear distance transformations of spatial data in R
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…
Expanding the city digital twin in the context of crisis, cartography and computation
This commentary responds to Gillian Rose's ‘Visualising human life in volumetric cities: city digital twins and other disasters’ as a framework for thinking about crisis and visual cultures in digital twinning practices. It frames Rose's analysis as a specific intervention into the visual and cultural relationship between filmic depictions of disaster and catastrophe replicated through white and masculinist imaginaries of the ordered rational cit…
Digital Twin or Digital Kin: Misunderstandings and Myths about Urban Simulation, and Directions for Change
Using three case studies from the United States and Australia, this article explores the conditions required to make urban digital twin projects successful, considering a traditional urban digital twins (UDT) project and National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded 3D gaming digital twins in New York and a large-scale federated UDT platform in New South Wales (NSW) Australia. The authors argue that questions around interoperability and profit and ten…
From the urban factory to the metaverse: Understanding datafication, spatial computing and digital twinning practices
This article considers digital twins and digital twinning practices in relation to the spaces of the factory, city, and the “metaverse.” We draw on the work of urban and new media theorists to argue that digital twins are part of a long history of urban media and computation. Expanding on Walter Benjamin’s notion of phantasmagoria, we argue that the logics of the factory inherent in early digital twins are intensified and expanded in the more rec…
Mapping elite tastes along New York City's gourmet gentrification frontier, 1990-2015
Urban researchers have long considered the spread of upscale amenities like restaurants, cafes and bars to be important symbolic indicators of gentrification, and recent scholarship has shown that increases in upscale consumption amenities are positively associated with rising rents and demographic changes. This article builds on research in urban and economic geography to consider the role of changing informational networks about consumption bus…
The pointillistic city , by Daniel O’Brien: Boston, MIT Press, 2025
The Section 8 (F)influencer economy
The Housing Choice Voucher (HCV, colloquially known as “Section 8” vouchers) program is one of the largest affordable housing programs in the United States, providing private market rental subsidies to millions of Americans annually. Over the past several years, a number of financial influencers have built large followings on social media by offering real estate investment advice focused on renting property to HCV holders. Influencers like Sectio…
Computer Science (8 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Political science (6 works) · Economics (5 works) · Geography (5 works) · Business (4 works) · Economic growth (4 works) · Sharing Economy and Platforms (4 works) · Archaeology (3 works) · Economic geography (3 works)