UC Berkeley

Contemporary digital location-based services (LBS) like Yelp, Foursquare, and Google Maps are part of a longer genealogy of "crowd-sourced" information systems quantifying urban amenities, starting with the 1980s debut of New York's Zagat Restaurant Survey. These distributed sociotechnical systems operate across a variety of scales, organizing information, human labor, and urban space. In this dissertation, I use archival research, key informant interviews, and spatial analysis of review data from 1980 to the present to argue that information systems have a material effect on development trajectories and everyday life in cities. These systems are shaped by and shape the urban settings in which they have been deployed, especially sites of early experimentation and development like New York City and San Francisco. Designed to index urban space for consumption, LBS and digital maps increasingly help to constitute it, as local reviews and social networks have become flashpoints in debates about gentrification, displacement, and structural racism.