Will Payne, Ph.D.

Will Payne, Ph.D. joined the Bloustein School in September 2020. He received his PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley, where he also was affiliated with the Berkeley Center for New Media, the Berkeley Food Institute, and the UC Berkeley Global Urban Humanities Initiative. Will uses quantitative and qualitative methods to study the relationship between geospatial technologies and urban inequality, examining how changing technical capabilities, labor relations, and competitive pressures in the location-based services (LBS) industry interact with processes of racialized and class-based segregation in American cities. He has published articles in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Urban Geography, Computational Culture, and Environment and Planning A, among other publications. Will’s current book project examines how different groups of urban residents use “urban information systems” like the Zagat Survey, Yelp, Foursquare, and Google Local to organize and understand their consumption experiences in cities, while technologists and real estate developers employ the resulting data to help transform marginal neighborhoods into upscale consumption spaces. Will also develops open-source tools for spatial data visualization and computational research.

Complete Curriculum Vitae (C.V.)