Will B. Payne
¤ I am Assistant Professor of Geographic Information Science at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University.
¤ I use quantitative and qualitative methods to study the relationship between geospatial technologies and urban inequality.
¤ I teach students how to acquire, clean, analyze, and visualize spatial data to address vital issues like housing justice and the climate crisis.
¤ I also make open-source tools for spatial data visualization and computational research.
¤ Email me at will dot b dot payne at rutgers dot edu. You can also find me on Google Scholar, GitHub, and the Bloustein School site.
Writing
Journal Articles
- Payne, Will B., Emma Fraser, and Clancy Wilmott. “Digital Twin or Digital Kin: Misunderstandings and Myths about Urban Simulation, and Directions for Change,” Journal of Planning Education and Research (2025).
- Payne, Will B. “Gourmet Gentrification: Mapping Elite Tastes along New York City’s Consumption Frontier, 1990-2015,” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space (2025).
- Laura Geronimo, Will B. Payne, Elisabeth Gilmore, Robert Kopp, and Clinton Andrews. “Cultural and Institutional Factors Driving Severe Repetitive Flood Losses: Insights from the Jersey Shore.” Risk Analysis. (2025).
- Fraser, Emma, Clancy Wilmott, and Will B. Payne. “From the Urban Factory to the Metaverse: Understanding Datafication, Spatial Computing and Digital Twinning Practice,” New Media & Society (2025).
- McGlynn, Evangeline & Will B. Payne. “Counter-GIS Experiments in Distance Interpolation: Case Studies with the Relational Reprojection Platform,” Cartographic Perspectives (2025).
- Wilmott, Clancy, Emma Fraser, and Will B. Payne. “Expanding the City Digital Twin in the Context of Crisis, Cartography, and Computation,” Dialogues in Urban Research (2025).
- Payne, Will B. “Review Bombing the Smart City: Contested Political Speech on Local Review Platforms,” Big Data & Society (2024).
- Deitz, Shiloh, Will B. Payne, Eric Seymour, Kathe Newman, and Lauren Nolan. “Local Landscapes of Assisted Housing: Reconciling Overlapping and Imprecise Administrative Data for Research Purposes,” Cityscape (2024).
- Payne, Will B. & Evangeline McGlynn. “Relational Reprojection Platform: Non-linear distance transformations of spatial data in R,” Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science (2024).
- Payne, Will B., Lauren Nolan, and Eric Seymour. “When a City isn’t a City: Aggregating Data from the Picture of Subsidized Households to the Municipal Scale for Research Purposes,” Cityscape (2023).
- Stehlin, John and Will B. Payne. "Disposable Infrastructures: 'Micromobility' Platforms and the Political Economy of Transport Disruption in Austin, Texas," Urban Studies (2022).
- Payne, Will B. "Powering the Local Review Engine at Yelp and Google: Intensive and Extensive Approaches to Crowdsourcing Spatial Data," Regional Studies (2021).
- Stehlin, John and Will B. Payne. "Meso-scale Infrastructures and Uneven Development: Bicycle Sharing Systems in the United States as “Already-Splintered” Urbanism," Annals of the American Association of Geographers (2021).
- Payne, Will, Sarah Knuth, and Dillon Mahmoudi. "Urban Real Estate Technologies: Genealogies, Frontiers, & Critiques," Urban Geography (2020).
- Payne, Will B. and and David O’Sullivan. "Exploding the Phone Book: Spatial Data Arbitrage in the 1990s Internet Boom," Annals of the American Association of Geographers (2020).
- Payne, Will. “Welcome to the Polygon: Contested Digital Neighborhoods and Spatialized Segregation on Nextdoor,” Computational Culture (2017).
- Co-authored with Thatcher et al. “Revisiting Critical GIS: Reflections from Friday Harbor,” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space (2016).
Book Chapters
- Payne, Will B. "The Zagat Survey, the Professional Class, and Quantified Lifestyles in 1980s New York" in The Performance Complex: Competitions and Valuations in Everyday Life, ed. David Stark (Oxford University Press, 2020).
- Payne, Will. "Piedmont-Oakland Border." in Rachel Brahinsky and Alex Tarr (eds.), A People's Guide to the Bay Area. University of California Press, 2020.
Research Reports
- Shiloh Deitz, Kathe Newman, Eric Seymour, Will B. Payne, and Lauren Nolan. “Federally Assisted Housing in New Jersey.” Ralph W. Voorhees Center for Civic Engagement, Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, Rutgers University (2024).
- Seymour, Eric, Will B. Payne, Kathe Newman, and Lauren Nolan. “Corporate Ownership of Small Residential Properties in Seven New Jersey Municipalities.” Ralph W. Voorhees Center for Civic Engagement (2024).
- Seymour, Eric, Nadia Mian, Kathe Newman, Emmy Tiderington, Shiloh Deitz, and Will B. Payne. “Homelessness in New Brunswick and Programs to Address It.” Ralph W. Voorhees Center for Civic Engagement (2024).
- Seymour, Eric, Will B. Payne, Kathe Newman, Shiloh Deitz, and Lauren Nolan. “Rent Control in New Jersey: What Is It? Where Is It? How Does It Work?” Ralph W. Voorhees Center for Civic Engagement (2023).
Other Publications
- Payne, Will. "Book Review: The Pointillistic City, by Daniel T. O’Brien." Journal of Urban Affairs (2025).
- Payne, Will. "Crawling the City." Logic, Vol. 4: Scale (2018).
- Payne, Will. "Book Review: Dubious Gastronomy: The Cultural Politics of Eating Asian in the USA, by Robert Ji-Song Ku." Graduate Journal of Food Studies (2018).
- Payne, Will. “Book Review: Location-based Social Media: Space, Time and Identity, by Leighton Evans and Michael Saker.” Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science (2018).
- Payne, Will and John Elrick. “Model City: Rule of Innovation.” 2015. Essay accompanying Robby Herbst’s New New Games exhibit, Southern Exposure Gallery, San Francisco, CA.
- Payne, Will. “From Bricks to Bus Stops: Protesting San Francisco’s Tech Boom” and “Black Cloud: Data and Empowerment.” 2014. UC Berkeley Global Urban Humanities Initiative Blog.
Media Coverage
- Freund, Helen. “She Reviewed a Tampa Restaurant on Yelp. Then Came a Lawsuit.” Tampa Bay Times, June 5, 2025.
- Bruno, Greg. “Not All ‘Review Bombing’ Is Bad for Business.” Rutgers Today, October 31, 2024.
- Kelatlhilwe, Tumisang. “Proximity of Bars to Schools Blamed for Students’ Alcohol Consumption.” The Ngami Times (Maun, Botswana), December 15-22, 2023.
- Mantle, Larry. "NextDoor Promised Changes To Make Its App Less Discriminatory. Has The App’s Culture Improved?" Air Talk, KPCC 89.3FM, March 16, 2021.
- Heilweil, Rebecca. "How the Covid-19 Pandemic Broke Nextdoor." Recode, February 9, 2021.
- Payne, Will B. "Using Crowdsourcing Applications to Interpret and Build More Equitable Cities." EJB Talks Podcast (Bloustein School, Rutgers University). October 27, 2020.
- Heilweil, Rebecca. "The Messy Politics of Nextdoor." Recode, October 26, 2020.
- Charles, J. Brian. "Are Smartphones Speeding Up Gentrification?" Governing, August 1, 2018.
- Parthasarathy, Padmini. "Technology Takeover: How Does GPS Affect Our Spatial Memory?" North Gate Radio, KALX 90.7FM, March 15, 2018.