Through digital mapping technologies, it is becoming easier for all manner of people to influence urban development efforts. This fact may be of particular significance to disabled communities, for whom urban environments are all-too-frequently inaccessible. Economic development in the U.S. has long depended on the GIS professional industry, even more so with the rise of smartphones. Companies and investors looking to target a particular geographic region place a high premium on personal location data–where city-dwellers shop, how often and where they drive, what transit systems they use, whom they go with, and so on. Increasingly, the answers to such queries are influenced by our growing dependence on cheap,…
Author: Sean Kamperman
Sean Kamperman
Sean Kamperman is a PhD student at the Ohio State University. His research interests include disability studies, material rhetorics of space and place, mapping, critical pedagogy, and nonprofit rhetoric.