Luis F Alvarez León
Biographic Data
| ID | 160393 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Luis F Alvarez León |
| GIVEN NAMES | Luis F Alvarez |
| FAMILY NAME | León |
| SIGNATURE | LEÓN L F A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Dartmouth College |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9888-4921 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 104 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Scams all the way up: The scam as vernacular analytic of digital capitalism
Scams have proliferated under digital capitalism; so too have stories of scams and allegations of scamming. In this commentary, we focus on the latter to situate the scam as a “vernacular analytic:” an everyday mode of critique invoked to question the normative systems and institutions that rule our lives, but are experienced as exploitative or rigged. While this vernacular analytic is a powerful and pervasive means to highlight inequality, we ar…
Economic Statecraft of the Hinge State: Industrialization Paths for the Electric Vehicle (EV) and Battery Industry in Hungary, Mexico, and Thailand
In responding to the calls to better incorporate the role of the state in economic geographic research, in this article we propose an expanded conceptualization of economic statecraft and explore the role of state capacity that forges industrialization paths. We focus on the rise of hinge states as a particular—and we argue, increasingly prevalent—form of economic statecraft under multipolarity that actively develops state capacity to address pow…
The variegated hinterlands of the digital growth machine
Digital capitalism reorganizes and differentiates land outside of urban cores into a variegated, novel set of hinterlands: spaces primed to support the specific needs of digital technology sector-related activities and associated urban growth. As cities operate as capital accumulation vehicles under digital capitalism, the sector reinforces and transforms extractive hinterland dynamics that have long supported cities, while expanding hinterland f…
What we talk about when we talk about Uber
The Map in the Machine: Charting the Spatial Architecture of Digital Capitalism
Digital technologies have changed how we shop, work, play, and communicate, reshaping our societies and economies. To understand digital capitalism, we need to grasp how advances in geospatial technologies underpin the construction, operation, and refinement of markets for digital goods and services. In The Map in the Machine , Luis F. Alvarez Leon examines these advances, from MapQuest and Google Maps to the rise of IP geolocation, ridesharing, …
AI and Global Climate Change: The political economy of data and energy in geographic perspective
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Global Climate Change are two developments that will come to define the twenty‐first century. As such, examining their intersections is crucial and can yield important insights. Geography is well positioned to study these intersections through its diverse conceptual and methodological toolkit, which bridges the physical and environmental science, the social sciences and the humanities, as well as the human and mor…
Land, reconfigured: Defying the laws of physics, upholding the rules of the market in the metaverse
Land ownership, occupancy, and use are enduringly central components of economies and societies across the world. Even in a capitalist economy increasingly mediated through digital technologies, land remains foundational to wide-ranging aspects of social life. However, conceptualizations of land fundamentally transform through virtual environments like the Metaverse, where digital or virtual land is a core feature. This article examines the const…
Signaling Hinterlands and the Spatial Networks of Digital Capitalism
This article develops the concept of signaling hinterlands to explain how digital social networks extend and shift the interconnections between a metropolis and its hinterlands. The relationship between metropolis and hinterlands—the multiple, overlapping, networked geographies on which cities rely—is a long-standing area of geographical inquiry. This dynamic reflects networks of densely and more sparsely populated places connected by asymmetric …
Behind the Wheel in the Driverless City: Autonomous Vehicle Mobilities and Regulatory Challenges
As the hype cycles surrounding autonomous vehicles (AVs) continue to oscillate, it appears that the mobilities they entail are set to become more than a fleeting feature of our socio-spatial landscapes. How to understand these emerging mobilities, the range of issues they generate, and the regulatory approaches they demand? This article centers on a single incident that took place on October 2, 2023, in San Francisco, where a Cruise vehicle pinne…
Industry emergence and market capture: The rise of autonomous vehicles
The politics of pixels: A review and agenda for critical remote sensing
We offer a review and research agenda for critical remote sensing, defined as inquiries and scientific practices cognizant of the embedding of power within the production, analysis, and instrumentalization of satellite imagery. First, we consider critiques of the satellite gaze. Second, we chronicle remote sensing’s evolving political economy, examining the technology’s use by governments, scientists, and commercial and non-governmental actors. T…
From glitch epistemologies to glitch politics
Given the influential (but incomplete) characterization of cities as computers, new ways of disrupting ruling urban computational logics become crucial to reimagine cities and urban life as they are constituted in the 21st century. Addressing this need, Agnieszka Leszczynski and Sarah Elwood center the notion of the glitch to develop glitch epistemologies. These are ways of knowing digitally mediated environments against the ruling urban computat…
The Digital Growth Machine: Urban Change and the Ideology of Technology
Technology sector–led urban growth combines digital accumulation and urban accumulation dynamics to transform urban growth processes and outcomes. Together, these forces create the digital growth machine: a potent urban growth variation that fosters four related capital accumulation avenues that enable and support its activities. First, the digital growth machine extends long-standing land development and industrial attraction strategies to promo…
AI and the capitalist space economy
The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has fuelled concerns ranging from ‘existential risk for humanity’, framed as evolutionary competition with machines, to predictions of the ‘end of work’ via widespread substitution of humans by robots. Yet these extreme scenarios tend to operate at the intractable scale of ‘humanity' and lack a geographically nuanced conceptual scaffolding. This article proposes such a scaffolding, starting with a conceptu…
Urban governance and autonomous vehicles
Technology as Ideology in Urban Governance
This article argues that the turn toward smart cities, emphasizing solutions, services, and infrastructures driven by digital technologies, has reinforced a dominant ideology shaping urban decision making, frameworks, and outcomes. Two core dimensions of this ideology of technology in urban governance interact to consequentially reshape urban processes: (1) the priority of attracting high-technology industries as engines for urban economies and (…
How cars became mobile spatial media: A geographical political economy of on-board navigation
While cars, by definition and necessity, have always been (auto)mobile, they are not often considered, or studied, as media. In light of this, the present article seeks to elucidate the technological, political, and economic forces that have converged to transform cars into mobile spatial media. This article provides a framework to contextualize the nodal role of navigation in creating the conditions for a large-scale disruption in automobile tec…
Eyes on the Road: Surveillance Logics in the Autonomous Vehicle Economy
As emblematic products of a previous industrial era, cars are often tied to a sphere outside the digital economy and its ruling logics and are, therefore, governed by different ideas of privacy, agency, and sovereignty. However, as self-driving cars gain momentum, computerization, and automation, their platformization contributes to transforming the automobile as technology, industry, and cultural artifact. This creates new spaces of consumption …
Will Review for Points: The Unpaid Affective Labour of Placemaking for Google’s ‘Local Guides’
A growing number of people are relying on technologies like Google Maps not only to navigate and locate themselves in cartographic space but also to search, discover and evaluate urban places. While the spatial data that underlies such technology frequently appears as a combination of Google-created maps and locational information passively collected from mobile (GPS-enabled) devices, in this article we argue that for such systems to function as …
The value of crowdsourced street-level imagery: Examining the shifting property regimes of OpenStreetCam and Mapillary
OpenStreetCam and Mapillary are two increasingly popular online services centered on providing street-level imagery through close association with the OpenStreetMap platform and crowdmapping community. While both services provide crowdsourced street-level imagery, the differences in their aims and operations present an opportunity to discuss the various ways in which commercialization dynamics and crowdmapping practices are reshaping each other i…
A blueprint for market construction? Spatial data infrastructure(s), interoperability, and the EU Digital Single Market
Information Policy and the Spatial Constitution of Digital Geographic Information Markets
Information policy has become one of the key instruments for the commodification and marketization of goods in contemporary capitalism. However, the spatializing role of this and other legal regimes has not been explored in depth. Among the categories of goods whose production and circulation is shaped by information policy, geographic information is increasingly salient in the digital economy due to the strategic and economic value derived from …
Introduction: The Spatial Constitution of Markets
Markets are central to the functioning of capitalism and hence essential to developing an understanding of this economic system. However, markets are often assumed, rather than examined, described
Production, Property, and the Construction of Remotely Sensed Data
Remote sensing, particularly satellite imaging, is widely used in scientific, government, and public applications. One of the reasons it is so highly valued is the perception of its fundamental objectivity and neutrality. Yet like all data, satellite imagery is a product of human action. Elements such as specific technologies, strategic priorities, and privileged interpretations influence the availability and applications of remotely sensed data.…
Architectures of the information age
Digital information has become the lifeblood of contemporary capitalism, circulating through networks that enable a range of applications unimaginable even two decades ago. Beyond the changes in fo
Technology as Ideology in Urban Governance
This article argues that the turn toward smart cities, emphasizing solutions, services, and infrastructures driven by digital technologies, has reinforced a dominant ideology shaping urban decision making, frameworks, and outcomes. Two core dimensions of this ideology of technology in urban governance interact to consequentially reshape urban processes: (1) the priority of attracting high-technology industries as engines for urban economies and (…
The Digital Growth Machine: Urban Change and the Ideology of Technology
Technology sector–led urban growth combines digital accumulation and urban accumulation dynamics to transform urban growth processes and outcomes. Together, these forces create the digital growth machine: a potent urban growth variation that fosters four related capital accumulation avenues that enable and support its activities. First, the digital growth machine extends long-standing land development and industrial attraction strategies to promo…
Property regimes and the commodification of geographic information: An examination of Google Street View
The body of information on the Internet is becoming increasingly geographical. This is both due to the expansion of established categories of geographic information (e.g., digital maps and geospatial databases) and to the simultaneous enrichment of other types of information through geographic identifiers (e.g., geotags, check-ins, and global positioning system coordinates). As this repository of geographic information expands, it is also a key s…
Signaling Hinterlands and the Spatial Networks of Digital Capitalism
This article develops the concept of signaling hinterlands to explain how digital social networks extend and shift the interconnections between a metropolis and its hinterlands. The relationship between metropolis and hinterlands—the multiple, overlapping, networked geographies on which cities rely—is a long-standing area of geographical inquiry. This dynamic reflects networks of densely and more sparsely populated places connected by asymmetric …
Introduction: The Spatial Constitution of Markets
Markets are central to the functioning of capitalism and hence essential to developing an understanding of this economic system. However, markets are often assumed, rather than examined, described
From glitch epistemologies to glitch politics
Given the influential (but incomplete) characterization of cities as computers, new ways of disrupting ruling urban computational logics become crucial to reimagine cities and urban life as they are constituted in the 21st century. Addressing this need, Agnieszka Leszczynski and Sarah Elwood center the notion of the glitch to develop glitch epistemologies. These are ways of knowing digitally mediated environments against the ruling urban computat…
How cars became mobile spatial media: A geographical political economy of on-board navigation
While cars, by definition and necessity, have always been (auto)mobile, they are not often considered, or studied, as media. In light of this, the present article seeks to elucidate the technological, political, and economic forces that have converged to transform cars into mobile spatial media. This article provides a framework to contextualize the nodal role of navigation in creating the conditions for a large-scale disruption in automobile tec…
Eyes on the Road: Surveillance Logics in the Autonomous Vehicle Economy
As emblematic products of a previous industrial era, cars are often tied to a sphere outside the digital economy and its ruling logics and are, therefore, governed by different ideas of privacy, agency, and sovereignty. However, as self-driving cars gain momentum, computerization, and automation, their platformization contributes to transforming the automobile as technology, industry, and cultural artifact. This creates new spaces of consumption …
AI and the capitalist space economy
The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has fuelled concerns ranging from ‘existential risk for humanity’, framed as evolutionary competition with machines, to predictions of the ‘end of work’ via widespread substitution of humans by robots. Yet these extreme scenarios tend to operate at the intractable scale of ‘humanity' and lack a geographically nuanced conceptual scaffolding. This article proposes such a scaffolding, starting with a conceptu…
Will Review for Points: The Unpaid Affective Labour of Placemaking for Google’s ‘Local Guides’
A growing number of people are relying on technologies like Google Maps not only to navigate and locate themselves in cartographic space but also to search, discover and evaluate urban places. While the spatial data that underlies such technology frequently appears as a combination of Google-created maps and locational information passively collected from mobile (GPS-enabled) devices, in this article we argue that for such systems to function as …
The value of crowdsourced street-level imagery: Examining the shifting property regimes of OpenStreetCam and Mapillary
OpenStreetCam and Mapillary are two increasingly popular online services centered on providing street-level imagery through close association with the OpenStreetMap platform and crowdmapping community. While both services provide crowdsourced street-level imagery, the differences in their aims and operations present an opportunity to discuss the various ways in which commercialization dynamics and crowdmapping practices are reshaping each other i…
A blueprint for market construction? Spatial data infrastructure(s), interoperability, and the EU Digital Single Market
Information Policy and the Spatial Constitution of Digital Geographic Information Markets
Information policy has become one of the key instruments for the commodification and marketization of goods in contemporary capitalism. However, the spatializing role of this and other legal regimes has not been explored in depth. Among the categories of goods whose production and circulation is shaped by information policy, geographic information is increasingly salient in the digital economy due to the strategic and economic value derived from …
Production, Property, and the Construction of Remotely Sensed Data
Remote sensing, particularly satellite imaging, is widely used in scientific, government, and public applications. One of the reasons it is so highly valued is the perception of its fundamental objectivity and neutrality. Yet like all data, satellite imagery is a product of human action. Elements such as specific technologies, strategic priorities, and privileged interpretations influence the availability and applications of remotely sensed data.…
AI and Global Climate Change: The political economy of data and energy in geographic perspective
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Global Climate Change are two developments that will come to define the twenty‐first century. As such, examining their intersections is crucial and can yield important insights. Geography is well positioned to study these intersections through its diverse conceptual and methodological toolkit, which bridges the physical and environmental science, the social sciences and the humanities, as well as the human and mor…
Land, reconfigured: Defying the laws of physics, upholding the rules of the market in the metaverse
Land ownership, occupancy, and use are enduringly central components of economies and societies across the world. Even in a capitalist economy increasingly mediated through digital technologies, land remains foundational to wide-ranging aspects of social life. However, conceptualizations of land fundamentally transform through virtual environments like the Metaverse, where digital or virtual land is a core feature. This article examines the const…
Urban governance and autonomous vehicles
The Digital Economy and Variegated Capitalism
This article sets out to conceptualize the ways in which the development of the digital economy (Malecki & Moriset, 2007) can be understood within the framework of variegated capitalism (Peck & Theodore, 2007). In doing so, it explores the question of how communication technologies interact with place-specific institutional, political, and economic configurations to shape the geographically differentiated construction of an economy centred on the…
Property regimes and the commodification of geographic information: An examination of Google Street View
The body of information on the Internet is becoming increasingly geographical. This is both due to the expansion of established categories of geographic information (e.g., digital maps and geospatial databases) and to the simultaneous enrichment of other types of information through geographic identifiers (e.g., geotags, check-ins, and global positioning system coordinates). As this repository of geographic information expands, it is also a key s…
Production, Property, and the Construction of Remotely Sensed Data
Remote sensing, particularly satellite imaging, is widely used in scientific, government, and public applications. One of the reasons it is so highly valued is the perception of its fundamental objectivity and neutrality. Yet like all data, satellite imagery is a product of human action. Elements such as specific technologies, strategic priorities, and privileged interpretations influence the availability and applications of remotely sensed data.…
Architectures of the information age
Digital information has become the lifeblood of contemporary capitalism, circulating through networks that enable a range of applications unimaginable even two decades ago. Beyond the changes in fo
The value of crowdsourced street-level imagery: Examining the shifting property regimes of OpenStreetCam and Mapillary
OpenStreetCam and Mapillary are two increasingly popular online services centered on providing street-level imagery through close association with the OpenStreetMap platform and crowdmapping community. While both services provide crowdsourced street-level imagery, the differences in their aims and operations present an opportunity to discuss the various ways in which commercialization dynamics and crowdmapping practices are reshaping each other i…
A blueprint for market construction? Spatial data infrastructure(s), interoperability, and the EU Digital Single Market
Information Policy and the Spatial Constitution of Digital Geographic Information Markets
Information policy has become one of the key instruments for the commodification and marketization of goods in contemporary capitalism. However, the spatializing role of this and other legal regimes has not been explored in depth. Among the categories of goods whose production and circulation is shaped by information policy, geographic information is increasingly salient in the digital economy due to the strategic and economic value derived from …
Introduction: The Spatial Constitution of Markets
Markets are central to the functioning of capitalism and hence essential to developing an understanding of this economic system. However, markets are often assumed, rather than examined, described
How cars became mobile spatial media: A geographical political economy of on-board navigation
While cars, by definition and necessity, have always been (auto)mobile, they are not often considered, or studied, as media. In light of this, the present article seeks to elucidate the technological, political, and economic forces that have converged to transform cars into mobile spatial media. This article provides a framework to contextualize the nodal role of navigation in creating the conditions for a large-scale disruption in automobile tec…
Eyes on the Road: Surveillance Logics in the Autonomous Vehicle Economy
As emblematic products of a previous industrial era, cars are often tied to a sphere outside the digital economy and its ruling logics and are, therefore, governed by different ideas of privacy, agency, and sovereignty. However, as self-driving cars gain momentum, computerization, and automation, their platformization contributes to transforming the automobile as technology, industry, and cultural artifact. This creates new spaces of consumption …
Will Review for Points: The Unpaid Affective Labour of Placemaking for Google’s ‘Local Guides’
A growing number of people are relying on technologies like Google Maps not only to navigate and locate themselves in cartographic space but also to search, discover and evaluate urban places. While the spatial data that underlies such technology frequently appears as a combination of Google-created maps and locational information passively collected from mobile (GPS-enabled) devices, in this article we argue that for such systems to function as …
Technology as Ideology in Urban Governance
This article argues that the turn toward smart cities, emphasizing solutions, services, and infrastructures driven by digital technologies, has reinforced a dominant ideology shaping urban decision making, frameworks, and outcomes. Two core dimensions of this ideology of technology in urban governance interact to consequentially reshape urban processes: (1) the priority of attracting high-technology industries as engines for urban economies and (…
AI and the capitalist space economy
The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has fuelled concerns ranging from ‘existential risk for humanity’, framed as evolutionary competition with machines, to predictions of the ‘end of work’ via widespread substitution of humans by robots. Yet these extreme scenarios tend to operate at the intractable scale of ‘humanity' and lack a geographically nuanced conceptual scaffolding. This article proposes such a scaffolding, starting with a conceptu…
Urban governance and autonomous vehicles
Industry emergence and market capture: The rise of autonomous vehicles
The politics of pixels: A review and agenda for critical remote sensing
We offer a review and research agenda for critical remote sensing, defined as inquiries and scientific practices cognizant of the embedding of power within the production, analysis, and instrumentalization of satellite imagery. First, we consider critiques of the satellite gaze. Second, we chronicle remote sensing’s evolving political economy, examining the technology’s use by governments, scientists, and commercial and non-governmental actors. T…
From glitch epistemologies to glitch politics
Given the influential (but incomplete) characterization of cities as computers, new ways of disrupting ruling urban computational logics become crucial to reimagine cities and urban life as they are constituted in the 21st century. Addressing this need, Agnieszka Leszczynski and Sarah Elwood center the notion of the glitch to develop glitch epistemologies. These are ways of knowing digitally mediated environments against the ruling urban computat…
The Digital Growth Machine: Urban Change and the Ideology of Technology
Technology sector–led urban growth combines digital accumulation and urban accumulation dynamics to transform urban growth processes and outcomes. Together, these forces create the digital growth machine: a potent urban growth variation that fosters four related capital accumulation avenues that enable and support its activities. First, the digital growth machine extends long-standing land development and industrial attraction strategies to promo…
Behind the Wheel in the Driverless City: Autonomous Vehicle Mobilities and Regulatory Challenges
As the hype cycles surrounding autonomous vehicles (AVs) continue to oscillate, it appears that the mobilities they entail are set to become more than a fleeting feature of our socio-spatial landscapes. How to understand these emerging mobilities, the range of issues they generate, and the regulatory approaches they demand? This article centers on a single incident that took place on October 2, 2023, in San Francisco, where a Cruise vehicle pinne…
The Map in the Machine: Charting the Spatial Architecture of Digital Capitalism
Digital technologies have changed how we shop, work, play, and communicate, reshaping our societies and economies. To understand digital capitalism, we need to grasp how advances in geospatial technologies underpin the construction, operation, and refinement of markets for digital goods and services. In The Map in the Machine , Luis F. Alvarez Leon examines these advances, from MapQuest and Google Maps to the rise of IP geolocation, ridesharing, …
AI and Global Climate Change: The political economy of data and energy in geographic perspective
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Global Climate Change are two developments that will come to define the twenty‐first century. As such, examining their intersections is crucial and can yield important insights. Geography is well positioned to study these intersections through its diverse conceptual and methodological toolkit, which bridges the physical and environmental science, the social sciences and the humanities, as well as the human and mor…
Land, reconfigured: Defying the laws of physics, upholding the rules of the market in the metaverse
Land ownership, occupancy, and use are enduringly central components of economies and societies across the world. Even in a capitalist economy increasingly mediated through digital technologies, land remains foundational to wide-ranging aspects of social life. However, conceptualizations of land fundamentally transform through virtual environments like the Metaverse, where digital or virtual land is a core feature. This article examines the const…
Signaling Hinterlands and the Spatial Networks of Digital Capitalism
This article develops the concept of signaling hinterlands to explain how digital social networks extend and shift the interconnections between a metropolis and its hinterlands. The relationship between metropolis and hinterlands—the multiple, overlapping, networked geographies on which cities rely—is a long-standing area of geographical inquiry. This dynamic reflects networks of densely and more sparsely populated places connected by asymmetric …
The variegated hinterlands of the digital growth machine
Digital capitalism reorganizes and differentiates land outside of urban cores into a variegated, novel set of hinterlands: spaces primed to support the specific needs of digital technology sector-related activities and associated urban growth. As cities operate as capital accumulation vehicles under digital capitalism, the sector reinforces and transforms extractive hinterland dynamics that have long supported cities, while expanding hinterland f…
What we talk about when we talk about Uber
Political science (18 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Economics (15 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Politics (12 works) · Geography (11 works) · Capitalism (9 works) · Economic geography (8 works) · Law (8 works)