Taylor Shelton
Biographic Data
| ID | 277316 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Taylor Shelton |
| GIVEN NAMES | Taylor |
| FAMILY NAME | Shelton |
| SIGNATURE | SHELTON T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Georgia State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0776-9296 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 525 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Rescaling Absenteeism: Mapping the Multi‐scalar and Relational Geographies of Absentee Housing Ownership in Atlanta
Absentee housing ownership is a crucial but underappreciated element of contemporary inequality. Most often, absenteeism is treated as a secondary or subsidiary process to other manifestations of housing injustice, and even where it is examined, it is usually conceptualized as a binary. However, like essentially all geographical processes, absenteeism is best conceived of in more relational and flexible terms that take account of the variety of f…
Banks on a plane: The possibilities and limits of spatial accessibility measures for understanding geographies of financial exclusion
This paper examines how the underlying assumptions of geospatial accessibility metrics impact their representation of social and spatial relations and how these assumptions ultimately produce differing understandings of financial exclusion and its geographies. As increasing scholarly and public attention has been paid to the role of policy and institutions in (re)producing racial inequality in the United States, the role of the financial and bank…
Horizontal Holdings: Untangling the Networks of Corporate Landlords
Since the capitalist and colonial enclosure of land-qua-property, the property parcel has served as the geographic foundation of land ownership. Bounded, self-contained, and mutually exclusive with all surrounding parcels, this geography is taken for granted in our contemporary understandings of property. As the ownership of land, property, and housing has become increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands in recent years, however, it perh…
Powered by gentrification: The uneven development of residential rooftop solar in Atlanta, Georgia
Challenging opacity, embracing fuzziness: Geographical thought and praxis in a post-truth age
Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in critical approaches to mapping and quantification within geography. Such works have embraced the potential of these methods to advance the cause of social and spatial justice in an increasingly data-driven world. But as more geographers are turning to these approaches, it seems that conventional sources of social data are less and less able to capture emerging forms of social and spatial inequali…
The metropolitan and neighborhood geographies of Reit- and private equity–owned single-family rentals
After the U.S. foreclosure crisis, institutional investors purchased thousands of homes and converted them into rental properties. Past research links these entities to a number of negative outcomes, including rent increases and eviction filings. This paper examines a larger variety of investors, including private equity firms and contract sellers. Using a national dataset of real estate transactions from 2010 to mid-2017, we examine the inter- a…
Listen to the People of Starkville: Dynamics of (Extra-)Local Political Opposition to Short-Term Rental Regulation in a Small Southern City
Though housing inequality is manifest in a variety of ways around the world, one of the most noteworthy has been the rise of short-term rentals. And while a growing body of literature has demonstrated the negative impacts of this new housing typology on cities and neighborhoods, as well as the need for such cities to regulate this phenomenon, scholars have had less to say about how the fights for and against these regulations have actually played…
How Private Equity Landlords Prey on Working-Class Communities of Color
Connecting country and city: The multiple geographies of real property ownership in the US
In this review, we bridge recent studies on the political economy of urban and rural real property ownership, focusing on the US. While there are many parallels and interlinkages between urban and rural phenomena, we note that the field generally produces a different literature for each space: one largely about urban housing and another about rural land. We argue that foregrounding their common legal status as "real property" can help develop new…
Making the Cotton District (White): Urban Renewal, New Urbanism, and the Construction of a Nostalgic Neo-Plantationist Pastiche
Sometimes heralded as the first ever new urbanist development, Starkville, Mississippi’s Cotton District neighborhood stands out as a relatively dense, walkable, and mixed-use neighborhood in the otherwise car-centric landscapes of the rural south. Together with the neighborhood’s colorful buildings reminiscent of the grand homes of the antebellum South, these elements obscure the fact that the neighborhood as it exists today is the result of a f…
Changing neighborhoods, shifting connections: Mapping relational geographies of gentrification using social media data
New sources of ‘big data’ are regularly described as revolutionizing the study of urban life. Of particular interest is analyzing gentrification, which has proven a challenging endeavor with conventional methods. Big data may offer a new approach to the persistent problem of defining and measuring gentrification, while also allowing us to rethink broader questions about theory and methodology in urban geography. Using geotagged Twitter data, we d…
Gameday homes: Mapping emerging geographies of housing speculation and absentee ownership in the American South
Community geography: Toward a disciplinary framework
Community geography is a growing subfield that provides a framework for relevant and engaged scholarship. In this paper, we define community geography as a form of research praxis, one that involves academic and public scholars with the goal of co-produced and mutually-beneficial knowledge. Community geography draws from a pragmatist model of inquiry, one that views communities as emergent through a recursive process of problem definition and soc…
A post-truth pandemic
As the coronavirus pandemic continues apace in the United States, the dizzying amount of data being generated, analyzed and consumed about the virus has led to calls to proclaim this the first 'data-driven pandemic'. But at the same time, it seems that this plethora of data has not meant a better grasp on the reality of the pandemic and its effects. Even as we have the potential to digitally track and trace nearly every single individual who has …
Actually existing smart citizens: Expertise and (non)participation in the making of the smart city
In response to the mounting criticism of emerging ‘smart cities’ strategies around the world, a number of individuals and institutions have attempted to pivot from discussions of smart cities towards a focus on ‘smart citizens’. While the smart citizen is most often seen as a kind of foil for those more stereotypically top-down, neoliberal and repressive visions of the smart city that have been widely critiqued within the literature, this paper a…
The Nature of Neighborhoods: Using Big Data to Rethink the Geographies of Atlanta's Neighborhood Planning Unit System
Neighborhoods have long held a central place in the analysis and planning of urban spaces. Despite this centrality, the exact definition of a neighborhood, as well as how and where to draw its boundaries, has remained unclear. Although these questions have generated significant academic debate, they have arguably little effect on people’s everyday lives or decision-making processes. Atlanta, Georgia, represents a different case, however, because …
Rethinking the Recap: Mapping the relational geographies of concentrated poverty and affluence in Lexington, Kentucky
The idea of concentrated poverty has long held a prominent place in understandings of racial and class inequality in American cities. While the spatial concentration of the poor is undoubtedly an important aspect of this story, concentrated poverty research suffers from a number of conceptual and methodological shortcomings. Through a case study of concentrated poverty and affluence in Lexington, Kentucky, this paper draws on relational socio-spa…
Mapping dispossession: Eviction, foreclosure and the multiple geographies of housing instability in Lexington, Kentucky
Our Digital Rights to the City
‘Our Digital Rights to the City’ is a small collection of articles about digital technology, data and the city. It covers a range of topics relating to the political and economic power of technologies that are now almost inescapable within the urban environment. This includes discussions surrounding security, mapping, real estate, smartphone applications and the broader idea of a ‘right to the city’ in a post-digital world. The collection is edit…
The urban geographical imagination in the age of Big Data
This paper explores the variety of ways that emerging sources of (big) data are being used to re-conceptualize the city, and how these understandings of what the urban is shapes the design of interventions into it. Drawing on work on the performativity of economics, this paper uses two vignettes of the 'new urban science' and municipal vacant property mapping in order to argue that the mobilization of Big Data in the urban context doesn't necessa…
Spatialities of data: Mapping social media ‘beyond the geotag’
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…
Information Society, Geography of
Social media and the city: Rethinking urban socio-spatial inequality using user-generated geographic information
The ‘actually existing smart city’
The ‘actually existing smart city’
Social media and the city: Rethinking urban socio-spatial inequality using user-generated geographic information
Beyond the geotag: Situating ‘big data’ and leveraging the potential of the geoweb
This article presents an overview and initial results of a geoweb analysis designed to provide the foundation for a continued discussion of the potential impacts of ‘big data’ for the practice of critical human geography. While Haklay's (2012) observation that social media content is generated by a small number of ‘outliers’ is correct, we explore alternative methods and conceptual frameworks that might allow for one to overcome the limitations o…
Actually existing smart citizens: Expertise and (non)participation in the making of the smart city
In response to the mounting criticism of emerging ‘smart cities’ strategies around the world, a number of individuals and institutions have attempted to pivot from discussions of smart cities towards a focus on ‘smart citizens’. While the smart citizen is most often seen as a kind of foil for those more stereotypically top-down, neoliberal and repressive visions of the smart city that have been widely critiqued within the literature, this paper a…
Geography and the future of big data, big data and the future of geography
As digital social data have become increasingly ubiquitous, many have turned their attention to harnessing these massive data sets in order to produce purportedly more accurate and complete understandings of social processes. This intervention addresses the relationships between geography and big data and their intertwined futures. We focus on the impacts of an age of big data on the discipline of geography and geographic thought and methodology,…
Community geography: Toward a disciplinary framework
Community geography is a growing subfield that provides a framework for relevant and engaged scholarship. In this paper, we define community geography as a form of research praxis, one that involves academic and public scholars with the goal of co-produced and mutually-beneficial knowledge. Community geography draws from a pragmatist model of inquiry, one that views communities as emergent through a recursive process of problem definition and soc…
Mapping dispossession: Eviction, foreclosure and the multiple geographies of housing instability in Lexington, Kentucky
Mapping the data shadows of Hurricane Sandy: Uncovering the sociospatial dimensions of ‘big data’
The urban geographical imagination in the age of Big Data
This paper explores the variety of ways that emerging sources of (big) data are being used to re-conceptualize the city, and how these understandings of what the urban is shapes the design of interventions into it. Drawing on work on the performativity of economics, this paper uses two vignettes of the 'new urban science' and municipal vacant property mapping in order to argue that the mobilization of Big Data in the urban context doesn't necessa…
Rethinking the Recap: Mapping the relational geographies of concentrated poverty and affluence in Lexington, Kentucky
The idea of concentrated poverty has long held a prominent place in understandings of racial and class inequality in American cities. While the spatial concentration of the poor is undoubtedly an important aspect of this story, concentrated poverty research suffers from a number of conceptual and methodological shortcomings. Through a case study of concentrated poverty and affluence in Lexington, Kentucky, this paper draws on relational socio-spa…
The metropolitan and neighborhood geographies of Reit- and private equity–owned single-family rentals
After the U.S. foreclosure crisis, institutional investors purchased thousands of homes and converted them into rental properties. Past research links these entities to a number of negative outcomes, including rent increases and eviction filings. This paper examines a larger variety of investors, including private equity firms and contract sellers. Using a national dataset of real estate transactions from 2010 to mid-2017, we examine the inter- a…
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 Nature of Neighborhoods: Using Big Data to Rethink the Geographies of Atlanta's Neighborhood Planning Unit System
Neighborhoods have long held a central place in the analysis and planning of urban spaces. Despite this centrality, the exact definition of a neighborhood, as well as how and where to draw its boundaries, has remained unclear. Although these questions have generated significant academic debate, they have arguably little effect on people’s everyday lives or decision-making processes. Atlanta, Georgia, represents a different case, however, because …
Spatialities of data: Mapping social media ‘beyond the geotag’
A post-truth pandemic
As the coronavirus pandemic continues apace in the United States, the dizzying amount of data being generated, analyzed and consumed about the virus has led to calls to proclaim this the first 'data-driven pandemic'. But at the same time, it seems that this plethora of data has not meant a better grasp on the reality of the pandemic and its effects. Even as we have the potential to digitally track and trace nearly every single individual who has …
Changing neighborhoods, shifting connections: Mapping relational geographies of gentrification using social media data
New sources of ‘big data’ are regularly described as revolutionizing the study of urban life. Of particular interest is analyzing gentrification, which has proven a challenging endeavor with conventional methods. Big data may offer a new approach to the persistent problem of defining and measuring gentrification, while also allowing us to rethink broader questions about theory and methodology in urban geography. Using geotagged Twitter data, we d…
Gameday homes: Mapping emerging geographies of housing speculation and absentee ownership in the American South
Connecting country and city: The multiple geographies of real property ownership in the US
In this review, we bridge recent studies on the political economy of urban and rural real property ownership, focusing on the US. While there are many parallels and interlinkages between urban and rural phenomena, we note that the field generally produces a different literature for each space: one largely about urban housing and another about rural land. We argue that foregrounding their common legal status as "real property" can help develop new…
Challenging opacity, embracing fuzziness: Geographical thought and praxis in a post-truth age
Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in critical approaches to mapping and quantification within geography. Such works have embraced the potential of these methods to advance the cause of social and spatial justice in an increasingly data-driven world. But as more geographers are turning to these approaches, it seems that conventional sources of social data are less and less able to capture emerging forms of social and spatial inequali…
How Private Equity Landlords Prey on Working-Class Communities of Color
Banks on a plane: The possibilities and limits of spatial accessibility measures for understanding geographies of financial exclusion
This paper examines how the underlying assumptions of geospatial accessibility metrics impact their representation of social and spatial relations and how these assumptions ultimately produce differing understandings of financial exclusion and its geographies. As increasing scholarly and public attention has been paid to the role of policy and institutions in (re)producing racial inequality in the United States, the role of the financial and bank…
Horizontal Holdings: Untangling the Networks of Corporate Landlords
Since the capitalist and colonial enclosure of land-qua-property, the property parcel has served as the geographic foundation of land ownership. Bounded, self-contained, and mutually exclusive with all surrounding parcels, this geography is taken for granted in our contemporary understandings of property. As the ownership of land, property, and housing has become increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands in recent years, however, it perh…
Listen to the People of Starkville: Dynamics of (Extra-)Local Political Opposition to Short-Term Rental Regulation in a Small Southern City
Though housing inequality is manifest in a variety of ways around the world, one of the most noteworthy has been the rise of short-term rentals. And while a growing body of literature has demonstrated the negative impacts of this new housing typology on cities and neighborhoods, as well as the need for such cities to regulate this phenomenon, scholars have had less to say about how the fights for and against these regulations have actually played…
Making the Cotton District (White): Urban Renewal, New Urbanism, and the Construction of a Nostalgic Neo-Plantationist Pastiche
Sometimes heralded as the first ever new urbanist development, Starkville, Mississippi’s Cotton District neighborhood stands out as a relatively dense, walkable, and mixed-use neighborhood in the otherwise car-centric landscapes of the rural south. Together with the neighborhood’s colorful buildings reminiscent of the grand homes of the antebellum South, these elements obscure the fact that the neighborhood as it exists today is the result of a f…
Volunteered Geographic Information and Crowdsourcing Disaster Relief: A Case Study of the Haitian Earthquake
This paper outlines the ways in which information technologies (ITs) were used in the Haiti relief effort, especially with respect to web‐based mapping services. Although there were numerous ways in which this took place, this paper focuses on four in particular: CrisisCamp Haiti, OpenStreetMap, Ushahidi, and GeoCommons. This analysis demonstrates that ITs were a key means through which individuals could make a tangible difference in the work of …
Geography and the future of big data, big data and the future of geography
As digital social data have become increasingly ubiquitous, many have turned their attention to harnessing these massive data sets in order to produce purportedly more accurate and complete understandings of social processes. This intervention addresses the relationships between geography and big data and their intertwined futures. We focus on the impacts of an age of big data on the discipline of geography and geographic thought and methodology,…
Beyond the geotag: Situating ‘big data’ and leveraging the potential of the geoweb
This article presents an overview and initial results of a geoweb analysis designed to provide the foundation for a continued discussion of the potential impacts of ‘big data’ for the practice of critical human geography. While Haklay's (2012) observation that social media content is generated by a small number of ‘outliers’ is correct, we explore alternative methods and conceptual frameworks that might allow for one to overcome the limitations o…
The ‘actually existing smart city’
Mapping the data shadows of Hurricane Sandy: Uncovering the sociospatial dimensions of ‘big data’
Information Society, Geography of
Social media and the city: Rethinking urban socio-spatial inequality using user-generated geographic information
Spatialities of data: Mapping social media ‘beyond the geotag’
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…
Our Digital Rights to the City
‘Our Digital Rights to the City’ is a small collection of articles about digital technology, data and the city. It covers a range of topics relating to the political and economic power of technologies that are now almost inescapable within the urban environment. This includes discussions surrounding security, mapping, real estate, smartphone applications and the broader idea of a ‘right to the city’ in a post-digital world. The collection is edit…
The urban geographical imagination in the age of Big Data
This paper explores the variety of ways that emerging sources of (big) data are being used to re-conceptualize the city, and how these understandings of what the urban is shapes the design of interventions into it. Drawing on work on the performativity of economics, this paper uses two vignettes of the 'new urban science' and municipal vacant property mapping in order to argue that the mobilization of Big Data in the urban context doesn't necessa…
Rethinking the Recap: Mapping the relational geographies of concentrated poverty and affluence in Lexington, Kentucky
The idea of concentrated poverty has long held a prominent place in understandings of racial and class inequality in American cities. While the spatial concentration of the poor is undoubtedly an important aspect of this story, concentrated poverty research suffers from a number of conceptual and methodological shortcomings. Through a case study of concentrated poverty and affluence in Lexington, Kentucky, this paper draws on relational socio-spa…
Mapping dispossession: Eviction, foreclosure and the multiple geographies of housing instability in Lexington, Kentucky
Actually existing smart citizens: Expertise and (non)participation in the making of the smart city
In response to the mounting criticism of emerging ‘smart cities’ strategies around the world, a number of individuals and institutions have attempted to pivot from discussions of smart cities towards a focus on ‘smart citizens’. While the smart citizen is most often seen as a kind of foil for those more stereotypically top-down, neoliberal and repressive visions of the smart city that have been widely critiqued within the literature, this paper a…
The Nature of Neighborhoods: Using Big Data to Rethink the Geographies of Atlanta's Neighborhood Planning Unit System
Neighborhoods have long held a central place in the analysis and planning of urban spaces. Despite this centrality, the exact definition of a neighborhood, as well as how and where to draw its boundaries, has remained unclear. Although these questions have generated significant academic debate, they have arguably little effect on people’s everyday lives or decision-making processes. Atlanta, Georgia, represents a different case, however, because …
Community geography: Toward a disciplinary framework
Community geography is a growing subfield that provides a framework for relevant and engaged scholarship. In this paper, we define community geography as a form of research praxis, one that involves academic and public scholars with the goal of co-produced and mutually-beneficial knowledge. Community geography draws from a pragmatist model of inquiry, one that views communities as emergent through a recursive process of problem definition and soc…
A post-truth pandemic
As the coronavirus pandemic continues apace in the United States, the dizzying amount of data being generated, analyzed and consumed about the virus has led to calls to proclaim this the first 'data-driven pandemic'. But at the same time, it seems that this plethora of data has not meant a better grasp on the reality of the pandemic and its effects. Even as we have the potential to digitally track and trace nearly every single individual who has …
Changing neighborhoods, shifting connections: Mapping relational geographies of gentrification using social media data
New sources of ‘big data’ are regularly described as revolutionizing the study of urban life. Of particular interest is analyzing gentrification, which has proven a challenging endeavor with conventional methods. Big data may offer a new approach to the persistent problem of defining and measuring gentrification, while also allowing us to rethink broader questions about theory and methodology in urban geography. Using geotagged Twitter data, we d…
Gameday homes: Mapping emerging geographies of housing speculation and absentee ownership in the American South
Powered by gentrification: The uneven development of residential rooftop solar in Atlanta, Georgia
Challenging opacity, embracing fuzziness: Geographical thought and praxis in a post-truth age
Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in critical approaches to mapping and quantification within geography. Such works have embraced the potential of these methods to advance the cause of social and spatial justice in an increasingly data-driven world. But as more geographers are turning to these approaches, it seems that conventional sources of social data are less and less able to capture emerging forms of social and spatial inequali…
The metropolitan and neighborhood geographies of Reit- and private equity–owned single-family rentals
After the U.S. foreclosure crisis, institutional investors purchased thousands of homes and converted them into rental properties. Past research links these entities to a number of negative outcomes, including rent increases and eviction filings. This paper examines a larger variety of investors, including private equity firms and contract sellers. Using a national dataset of real estate transactions from 2010 to mid-2017, we examine the inter- a…
Listen to the People of Starkville: Dynamics of (Extra-)Local Political Opposition to Short-Term Rental Regulation in a Small Southern City
Though housing inequality is manifest in a variety of ways around the world, one of the most noteworthy has been the rise of short-term rentals. And while a growing body of literature has demonstrated the negative impacts of this new housing typology on cities and neighborhoods, as well as the need for such cities to regulate this phenomenon, scholars have had less to say about how the fights for and against these regulations have actually played…
How Private Equity Landlords Prey on Working-Class Communities of Color
Connecting country and city: The multiple geographies of real property ownership in the US
In this review, we bridge recent studies on the political economy of urban and rural real property ownership, focusing on the US. While there are many parallels and interlinkages between urban and rural phenomena, we note that the field generally produces a different literature for each space: one largely about urban housing and another about rural land. We argue that foregrounding their common legal status as "real property" can help develop new…
Political science (15 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Economics (12 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Geography (11 works) · Economic geography (10 works) · Geographic Information Systems Studies (10 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (10 works) · Data science (9 works) · Law (8 works)