Dillon Mahmoudi
Biographic Data
| ID | 1340765 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dillon Mahmoudi |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dillon |
| FAMILY NAME | Mahmoudi |
| SIGNATURE | MAHMOUDI D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Maryland, Baltimore County |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8816-1639 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 230 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Navigating digital geographies: Black boxes, geospatial narratives, and the art of constructing location data
Smartphone location data are often treated as objective and self-evident—but it is neither. This article opens the black box of how location is constructed on the phone and in the cloud, arguing that these processes are foundational to digital geography and central to how its infrastructures take shape. Drawing on an original experiment conducted in Kingston, Ontario and Baltimore, Maryland, we reverse-engineer and document the different methods …
Bluetech in Baltimore: Co-creating smart city innovations with local youth
Geography of race and income shape spatial data gaps in two national participatory science projects
Context and Need : Participatory projects where people contribute geo‐referenced biodiversity data, like eBird and iNaturalist, are commonly used tools to enhance the data collection capacity for research, management, and environmental learning. Despite their utility, demographic disparities in participation, demographic patterns of residential segregation, and individual choice of participation may skew data, influencing research outcomes, manag…
Interrogating narratives of urban change: Disinvestment and development in two neighborhoods in Baltimore, MD
Popular press and academic narratives of neighborhood change frequently conflate the experiences of different non-white populations in working-class and poor areas, presenting them as detrimental to urban development and at risk of displacement and eviction. Such narratives provide justification for uneven disinvestment and overlook the variegated ways in which urban development strategies can be exploitative. Mislabeling urban change as gentrifi…
Uneven development and the anti-politics machine: Algorithmic violence and market-based neighborhood rankings
From Foss to profit: Digital spatial technologies and the mode of production
Existing literature has scrutinized the impact of geospatial technologies from various angles. This article adopts a heterodox vantage point—the mode of production—to illuminate the intricate power dynamics woven into the fabric of these technologies. By focusing on the mode of production, we meticulously demonstrate how ostensibly novel digital technologies and geospatial data formats wield power within social relations of production. Responding…
The urban-tech feedback loop: A surveillance and development data-walk in South Lake Union
In this research article, we employed an autoethnographic data-walk methodology to explore the complex relationship between urban spaces and digital data collection, using the South Lake Union neighborhood as a case study. We examined how major technology companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and various property developers leverage the dual forces of urbanization and data gathering to shape urban environments in ways that serve their interests. Our …
The Ground Rent Machine: The Story of Race, Housing Inequality, and Dispossession in Baltimore, Maryland
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 own…
Assessing performance of ZCTA-level and Census Tract-level social and environmental risk factors in a model predicting hospital events
Witches as glitches: A response to Leszczynski and Elwood
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 disrupt…
Mapping Juvenile Justice: Identifying Existing Structural Barriers to Accessing Probation Services
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 probat…
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…
Reproducing spatial inequality? The sustainability fix and barriers to urban mobility in Portland, Oregon
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…
Beyond the Screen: Uneven Geographies, Digital Labour, and the City of Cognitive-Cultural Capitalism
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, …
Melody L. Hoffmann, Bike lanes are white lanes: Bicycle advocacy and urban planning
Melody L. Hoffmann, Bike lanes are white lanes: bicycle advocacy and urban planning." Urban Geography, 38(6), pp. 951–952
Data colonialism through accumulation by dispossession: New metaphors for daily data
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, political, and economic agendas behind big data are less new than they are often portrayed. Compared…
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…
The Neoliberal Politics of “Smart”: Electricity Consumption, Household Monitoring, and the Enterprise Form
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 in ICT through quotidian processes and practices of social reproduction. In this regard, the concept…
Citizen Participation, Open Innovation, and Crowdsourcing: Challenges and Opportunities for Planning
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 mo…
Data colonialism through accumulation by dispossession: New metaphors for daily data
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, political, and economic agendas behind big data are less new than they are often portrayed. Compared…
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…
Reproducing spatial inequality? The sustainability fix and barriers to urban mobility in Portland, Oregon
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…
Interrogating narratives of urban change: Disinvestment and development in two neighborhoods in Baltimore, MD
Popular press and academic narratives of neighborhood change frequently conflate the experiences of different non-white populations in working-class and poor areas, presenting them as detrimental to urban development and at risk of displacement and eviction. Such narratives provide justification for uneven disinvestment and overlook the variegated ways in which urban development strategies can be exploitative. Mislabeling urban change as gentrifi…
Witches as glitches: A response to Leszczynski and Elwood
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 disrupt…
Mapping Juvenile Justice: Identifying Existing Structural Barriers to Accessing Probation Services
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 probat…
From Foss to profit: Digital spatial technologies and the mode of production
Existing literature has scrutinized the impact of geospatial technologies from various angles. This article adopts a heterodox vantage point—the mode of production—to illuminate the intricate power dynamics woven into the fabric of these technologies. By focusing on the mode of production, we meticulously demonstrate how ostensibly novel digital technologies and geospatial data formats wield power within social relations of production. Responding…
The urban-tech feedback loop: A surveillance and development data-walk in South Lake Union
In this research article, we employed an autoethnographic data-walk methodology to explore the complex relationship between urban spaces and digital data collection, using the South Lake Union neighborhood as a case study. We examined how major technology companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and various property developers leverage the dual forces of urbanization and data gathering to shape urban environments in ways that serve their interests. Our …
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…
Uneven development and the anti-politics machine: Algorithmic violence and market-based neighborhood rankings
Citizen Participation, Open Innovation, and Crowdsourcing: Challenges and Opportunities for Planning
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 mo…
The Neoliberal Politics of “Smart”: Electricity Consumption, Household Monitoring, and the Enterprise Form
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 in ICT through quotidian processes and practices of social reproduction. In this regard, the concept…
Beyond the Screen: Uneven Geographies, Digital Labour, and the City of Cognitive-Cultural Capitalism
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, …
Melody L. Hoffmann, Bike lanes are white lanes: Bicycle advocacy and urban planning
Melody L. Hoffmann, Bike lanes are white lanes: bicycle advocacy and urban planning." Urban Geography, 38(6), pp. 951–952
Data colonialism through accumulation by dispossession: New metaphors for daily data
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, political, and economic agendas behind big data are less new than they are often portrayed. Compared…
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…
Reproducing spatial inequality? The sustainability fix and barriers to urban mobility in Portland, Oregon
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…
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…
Mapping Juvenile Justice: Identifying Existing Structural Barriers to Accessing Probation Services
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 probat…
Witches as glitches: A response to Leszczynski and Elwood
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 disrupt…
Assessing performance of ZCTA-level and Census Tract-level social and environmental risk factors in a model predicting hospital events
From Foss to profit: Digital spatial technologies and the mode of production
Existing literature has scrutinized the impact of geospatial technologies from various angles. This article adopts a heterodox vantage point—the mode of production—to illuminate the intricate power dynamics woven into the fabric of these technologies. By focusing on the mode of production, we meticulously demonstrate how ostensibly novel digital technologies and geospatial data formats wield power within social relations of production. Responding…
The urban-tech feedback loop: A surveillance and development data-walk in South Lake Union
In this research article, we employed an autoethnographic data-walk methodology to explore the complex relationship between urban spaces and digital data collection, using the South Lake Union neighborhood as a case study. We examined how major technology companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and various property developers leverage the dual forces of urbanization and data gathering to shape urban environments in ways that serve their interests. Our …
The Ground Rent Machine: The Story of Race, Housing Inequality, and Dispossession in Baltimore, Maryland
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 own…
Interrogating narratives of urban change: Disinvestment and development in two neighborhoods in Baltimore, MD
Popular press and academic narratives of neighborhood change frequently conflate the experiences of different non-white populations in working-class and poor areas, presenting them as detrimental to urban development and at risk of displacement and eviction. Such narratives provide justification for uneven disinvestment and overlook the variegated ways in which urban development strategies can be exploitative. Mislabeling urban change as gentrifi…
Uneven development and the anti-politics machine: Algorithmic violence and market-based neighborhood rankings
Navigating digital geographies: Black boxes, geospatial narratives, and the art of constructing location data
Smartphone location data are often treated as objective and self-evident—but it is neither. This article opens the black box of how location is constructed on the phone and in the cloud, arguing that these processes are foundational to digital geography and central to how its infrastructures take shape. Drawing on an original experiment conducted in Kingston, Ontario and Baltimore, Maryland, we reverse-engineer and document the different methods …
Bluetech in Baltimore: Co-creating smart city innovations with local youth
Geography of race and income shape spatial data gaps in two national participatory science projects
Context and Need : Participatory projects where people contribute geo‐referenced biodiversity data, like eBird and iNaturalist, are commonly used tools to enhance the data collection capacity for research, management, and environmental learning. Despite their utility, demographic disparities in participation, demographic patterns of residential segregation, and individual choice of participation may skew data, influencing research outcomes, manag…
Political science (11 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Economics (8 works) · Geography (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (6 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Economic growth (5 works) · Business (4 works) · Economic geography (4 works)