Kafui Attoh
Biographic Data
| ID | 254822 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kafui Attoh |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kafui |
| FAMILY NAME | Attoh |
| SIGNATURE | ATTOH K |
| AFFILIATIONS | City University of New York |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3483-5156 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 289 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
The rise of Uber and the fall of the state
Reclaiming the road
Filming Urban Class Consciousness
“Fixing” Mobility Platform Research
Mobility platforms have been transforming cities for fifteen years now. Research on these platforms is in robust shape, but there are emerging tensions surrounding how we frame and research platforms’ effects. Increasingly, two opposing views are coalescing. On the one hand, platforms are seen through a Marxist lens as part of an urban spatial fix. On the other hand, research grounded in Feminist geographies, Black, and Queer studies, sees a spat…
Speculative geographies
Speculative thinking has made its mark in several disciplines and literary genres, including continental philosophy, predictive analytics, and science (or speculative) fiction. What might speculation look like through a geographical lens? And how would such thinking in a distinctly geographical register build on and possibly place into a wider context work on utopias, alternative communities, game worldscapes, and speculative futures? This conver…
The work of waiting
Drawing on research conducted with platform delivery workers in Washington D.C., this paper builds on the work of scholars committed to both describing and challenging the degrading conditions that so often define the gig economy. Acknowledging the importance of both employee classification and citizenship status to understanding the plight of platform-based migrant workers, this paper directs attention to the distinction that platform companies …
The triumph of David Harvey’s Social Justice and the City
In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the publication of David Harvey’s Social Justice and the City, this paper examines the continued relevance of Harvey’s work on the study of cities. The author draws on his own experience in the classroom to identify the value of Harvey’s work in providing a critical counterpoint to the simplistic liberal and neoliberal models of urban life and social justice that persist. The paper provides a brief summ…
Leaders, Laggards, or Labor
As I write this in August 2020, academics across the United States are demanding their right to work from home, to teach online, and to slow their tenure clocks. Many academics are also traveling l
Winners of the Ashby prizes
Between ‘automated geography’ and ‘geographies of automation’
In this article, we identify what appear to be two separate approaches to questions of automation within the discipline of Geography. One approach, which we call ‘Automated Geography', examines how automation and technological change impact the discipline itself – everything from how we conduct research to how we relate to institutional power. The second approach, which we deem ‘Geographies of Automation', examines automation’s impact on the worl…
"Just-in-Place" labor
This paper examines the socio-spatial dynamics of worker agency in the platform economy in the Washington, D.C. region. Drawing on the field of labor geography, we document the collective and inherently spatial conditions of laboring under and through new technologies for three years prior to, and six months after, a strike by Uber drivers in May 2019. In doing so, we explore what Uber's platform means for the production, accumulation, and contes…
Rights in Transit
In recent years, a number of researchers in geography and in urban studies have taken to the idea of the "right to the city." These scholars have drawn on the idea to frame debates on topics as wide ranging as urban social movements, the regulation of urban public space, to the relationship between cities and citizenship. Implicit in this literature is a conception of the city and of urban space in which political conflict and class struggle are …
We're building their data
In 2017, Uber Technologies Inc. launched a new service called Uber Movement. Designed by a team of 10 engineers, the new service provided a select number of cities access to Uber's vast trove of transportation data. One of the first cities to partner with Uber on this initiative was Washington, DC. Playing directly to the city's longstanding "smart city" aspirations, the initiative was greeted warmly by city officials eager to market the region a…
Transportation and Revolt
Public transportation and the idiocy of urban life
This paper asserts urban transportation’s centrality to debates on ‘the public,’ the ‘right to the city’ and political mobilisation in cities. The paper begins with a re-reading of Marx and Engels’ oft-cited line in the Communist Manifesto on the ‘idiocy of rural life’. Drawing on the work of Hal Draper, who has argued that Marx and Engels used the term ‘idiocy’ as a synonym for ‘privatised isolation’, this paper pulls from two empirical studies …
To the Editors
Whose city? What politics? Contentious and non-contentious spaces on Colorado’s Front Range
Drawing on research from Colorado’s Front Range (the Denver/Boulder metropolitan area), this paper examines the validity of the ‘post-political’ hypothesis for explaining contentiousness and non-contentiousness in urban space. Examining major urban redevelopment efforts in Denver and a controversy over homeless people sleeping in public space in Boulder, we suggest that the literature on post-politics too narrowly circumscribes the realm of polit…
Imagining a “cultural turn” in transportation geography
This paper asks what a “cultural turn” in transportation geography might look like. In taking seriously Susan Hanson's claim that transportation geography has become a “moribund corner” of the discipline, this paper suggests a set of new avenues for inquiry. To do so, the paper draws on fieldwork I conducted in California's East Bay, as well as the story a fictitious transit system called the “B-Line.” Despite being a fiction, I argue that the B-…
What Type of Public Transit for What Type of Public
Contested Engagements
In this paper, a framework is presented for exploring how youth perform their citizenship through political engagements. The framework provides a way to explore the agency of youthful citizens as imagined by different agents and the ways that youth understand their performances as citizenship. Using interviews with university students and administrators at six universities in Manchester and Glasgow, a distinction is highlighted between agency and…
What kind of right is the right to the city
This essay critically examines the concept of the right to the city. While many progressive scholars have embraced the idea of the right to the city, what these scholars mean by rights has often been left unexplored. The first half of this essay focuses on the distinctions that political philosophers and legal scholars often draw between various kinds and forms of rights. The second section focuses specifically on how rights are mobilized within …
Contesting Neoliberalism
Helga Leitner, Jamie Peck and Eric S. Sheppard ( eds ), Contesting Neoliberalism: Urban Frontiers . New York : Guilford Press , 2007 . xii + 336 pp . ISBN-10:1-59385-320-3 ( paperback: alk. paper ). Above all, Contesting Neoliberalism: Urban Frontiers is a collection of snapshots. Each snapshot, albeit taken from a different geographic or ideological position, is focused on the same object: neoliberalism and its discontents. In offering this coll…
What kind of right is the right to the city
This essay critically examines the concept of the right to the city. While many progressive scholars have embraced the idea of the right to the city, what these scholars mean by rights has often been left unexplored. The first half of this essay focuses on the distinctions that political philosophers and legal scholars often draw between various kinds and forms of rights. The second section focuses specifically on how rights are mobilized within …
We're building their data
In 2017, Uber Technologies Inc. launched a new service called Uber Movement. Designed by a team of 10 engineers, the new service provided a select number of cities access to Uber's vast trove of transportation data. One of the first cities to partner with Uber on this initiative was Washington, DC. Playing directly to the city's longstanding "smart city" aspirations, the initiative was greeted warmly by city officials eager to market the region a…
"Just-in-Place" labor
This paper examines the socio-spatial dynamics of worker agency in the platform economy in the Washington, D.C. region. Drawing on the field of labor geography, we document the collective and inherently spatial conditions of laboring under and through new technologies for three years prior to, and six months after, a strike by Uber drivers in May 2019. In doing so, we explore what Uber's platform means for the production, accumulation, and contes…
Contested Engagements
In this paper, a framework is presented for exploring how youth perform their citizenship through political engagements. The framework provides a way to explore the agency of youthful citizens as imagined by different agents and the ways that youth understand their performances as citizenship. Using interviews with university students and administrators at six universities in Manchester and Glasgow, a distinction is highlighted between agency and…
Whose city? What politics? Contentious and non-contentious spaces on Colorado’s Front Range
Drawing on research from Colorado’s Front Range (the Denver/Boulder metropolitan area), this paper examines the validity of the ‘post-political’ hypothesis for explaining contentiousness and non-contentiousness in urban space. Examining major urban redevelopment efforts in Denver and a controversy over homeless people sleeping in public space in Boulder, we suggest that the literature on post-politics too narrowly circumscribes the realm of polit…
The work of waiting
Drawing on research conducted with platform delivery workers in Washington D.C., this paper builds on the work of scholars committed to both describing and challenging the degrading conditions that so often define the gig economy. Acknowledging the importance of both employee classification and citizenship status to understanding the plight of platform-based migrant workers, this paper directs attention to the distinction that platform companies …
Public transportation and the idiocy of urban life
This paper asserts urban transportation’s centrality to debates on ‘the public,’ the ‘right to the city’ and political mobilisation in cities. The paper begins with a re-reading of Marx and Engels’ oft-cited line in the Communist Manifesto on the ‘idiocy of rural life’. Drawing on the work of Hal Draper, who has argued that Marx and Engels used the term ‘idiocy’ as a synonym for ‘privatised isolation’, this paper pulls from two empirical studies …
Speculative geographies
Speculative thinking has made its mark in several disciplines and literary genres, including continental philosophy, predictive analytics, and science (or speculative) fiction. What might speculation look like through a geographical lens? And how would such thinking in a distinctly geographical register build on and possibly place into a wider context work on utopias, alternative communities, game worldscapes, and speculative futures? This conver…
Between ‘automated geography’ and ‘geographies of automation’
In this article, we identify what appear to be two separate approaches to questions of automation within the discipline of Geography. One approach, which we call ‘Automated Geography', examines how automation and technological change impact the discipline itself – everything from how we conduct research to how we relate to institutional power. The second approach, which we deem ‘Geographies of Automation', examines automation’s impact on the worl…
Imagining a “cultural turn” in transportation geography
This paper asks what a “cultural turn” in transportation geography might look like. In taking seriously Susan Hanson's claim that transportation geography has become a “moribund corner” of the discipline, this paper suggests a set of new avenues for inquiry. To do so, the paper draws on fieldwork I conducted in California's East Bay, as well as the story a fictitious transit system called the “B-Line.” Despite being a fiction, I argue that the B-…
Contesting Neoliberalism
Helga Leitner, Jamie Peck and Eric S. Sheppard ( eds ), Contesting Neoliberalism: Urban Frontiers . New York : Guilford Press , 2007 . xii + 336 pp . ISBN-10:1-59385-320-3 ( paperback: alk. paper ). Above all, Contesting Neoliberalism: Urban Frontiers is a collection of snapshots. Each snapshot, albeit taken from a different geographic or ideological position, is focused on the same object: neoliberalism and its discontents. In offering this coll…
What kind of right is the right to the city
This essay critically examines the concept of the right to the city. While many progressive scholars have embraced the idea of the right to the city, what these scholars mean by rights has often been left unexplored. The first half of this essay focuses on the distinctions that political philosophers and legal scholars often draw between various kinds and forms of rights. The second section focuses specifically on how rights are mobilized within …
Contested Engagements
In this paper, a framework is presented for exploring how youth perform their citizenship through political engagements. The framework provides a way to explore the agency of youthful citizens as imagined by different agents and the ways that youth understand their performances as citizenship. Using interviews with university students and administrators at six universities in Manchester and Glasgow, a distinction is highlighted between agency and…
Imagining a “cultural turn” in transportation geography
This paper asks what a “cultural turn” in transportation geography might look like. In taking seriously Susan Hanson's claim that transportation geography has become a “moribund corner” of the discipline, this paper suggests a set of new avenues for inquiry. To do so, the paper draws on fieldwork I conducted in California's East Bay, as well as the story a fictitious transit system called the “B-Line.” Despite being a fiction, I argue that the B-…
What Type of Public Transit for What Type of Public
To the Editors
Whose city? What politics? Contentious and non-contentious spaces on Colorado’s Front Range
Drawing on research from Colorado’s Front Range (the Denver/Boulder metropolitan area), this paper examines the validity of the ‘post-political’ hypothesis for explaining contentiousness and non-contentiousness in urban space. Examining major urban redevelopment efforts in Denver and a controversy over homeless people sleeping in public space in Boulder, we suggest that the literature on post-politics too narrowly circumscribes the realm of polit…
Transportation and Revolt
Public transportation and the idiocy of urban life
This paper asserts urban transportation’s centrality to debates on ‘the public,’ the ‘right to the city’ and political mobilisation in cities. The paper begins with a re-reading of Marx and Engels’ oft-cited line in the Communist Manifesto on the ‘idiocy of rural life’. Drawing on the work of Hal Draper, who has argued that Marx and Engels used the term ‘idiocy’ as a synonym for ‘privatised isolation’, this paper pulls from two empirical studies …
We're building their data
In 2017, Uber Technologies Inc. launched a new service called Uber Movement. Designed by a team of 10 engineers, the new service provided a select number of cities access to Uber's vast trove of transportation data. One of the first cities to partner with Uber on this initiative was Washington, DC. Playing directly to the city's longstanding "smart city" aspirations, the initiative was greeted warmly by city officials eager to market the region a…
Rights in Transit
In recent years, a number of researchers in geography and in urban studies have taken to the idea of the "right to the city." These scholars have drawn on the idea to frame debates on topics as wide ranging as urban social movements, the regulation of urban public space, to the relationship between cities and citizenship. Implicit in this literature is a conception of the city and of urban space in which political conflict and class struggle are …
Between ‘automated geography’ and ‘geographies of automation’
In this article, we identify what appear to be two separate approaches to questions of automation within the discipline of Geography. One approach, which we call ‘Automated Geography', examines how automation and technological change impact the discipline itself – everything from how we conduct research to how we relate to institutional power. The second approach, which we deem ‘Geographies of Automation', examines automation’s impact on the worl…
"Just-in-Place" labor
This paper examines the socio-spatial dynamics of worker agency in the platform economy in the Washington, D.C. region. Drawing on the field of labor geography, we document the collective and inherently spatial conditions of laboring under and through new technologies for three years prior to, and six months after, a strike by Uber drivers in May 2019. In doing so, we explore what Uber's platform means for the production, accumulation, and contes…
Leaders, Laggards, or Labor
As I write this in August 2020, academics across the United States are demanding their right to work from home, to teach online, and to slow their tenure clocks. Many academics are also traveling l
Winners of the Ashby prizes
The triumph of David Harvey’s Social Justice and the City
In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the publication of David Harvey’s Social Justice and the City, this paper examines the continued relevance of Harvey’s work on the study of cities. The author draws on his own experience in the classroom to identify the value of Harvey’s work in providing a critical counterpoint to the simplistic liberal and neoliberal models of urban life and social justice that persist. The paper provides a brief summ…
“Fixing” Mobility Platform Research
Mobility platforms have been transforming cities for fifteen years now. Research on these platforms is in robust shape, but there are emerging tensions surrounding how we frame and research platforms’ effects. Increasingly, two opposing views are coalescing. On the one hand, platforms are seen through a Marxist lens as part of an urban spatial fix. On the other hand, research grounded in Feminist geographies, Black, and Queer studies, sees a spat…
Speculative geographies
Speculative thinking has made its mark in several disciplines and literary genres, including continental philosophy, predictive analytics, and science (or speculative) fiction. What might speculation look like through a geographical lens? And how would such thinking in a distinctly geographical register build on and possibly place into a wider context work on utopias, alternative communities, game worldscapes, and speculative futures? This conver…
The work of waiting
Drawing on research conducted with platform delivery workers in Washington D.C., this paper builds on the work of scholars committed to both describing and challenging the degrading conditions that so often define the gig economy. Acknowledging the importance of both employee classification and citizenship status to understanding the plight of platform-based migrant workers, this paper directs attention to the distinction that platform companies …
The rise of Uber and the fall of the state
Reclaiming the road
Filming Urban Class Consciousness
Sociology (14 works) · Political science (13 works) · Economics (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Law (7 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Political economy (5 works) · Politics (5 works) · Social science (5 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (5 works)