Professor Tarr is a broadly trained human geographer with interests in urban geography, critical cartography and GIS, and digital culture.
His current research and teaching focuses largely on the City of Worcester and how the city is imagined and remade in a period of widespread gentrification in US cities and the rise of digital cultures.
His co-authored book with Rachel Brahinsky “A Peoples Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area” (forthcoming Fall 2020 from UC Press) will provide a critical-geography of the SF Bay Area region.
In addition to the book manuscript, Alex has been contributing the development of a digital platform to host People’s Guide projects in the model of the UC book series, collaborating with the series editors and teams around the US.
He has researched and written on urban agriculture, social justice struggles, and the use of digital technology in both, including his dissertation “Have Your City and Eat It Too: Los Angeles and the Urban Food Renaissance.”
from the Atlas website: Food: An Atlas is a crowdsourced project of guerrilla cartography and publishing. The atlas endeavors to map food in its myriad contexts and conditions at many scales of research and geography. Scores of cartographers and food researchers just traditional cartography, poster art, infographics, and journalistic text-blocking to render the map as a narrative device in the spirit of knowledge-caching and -sharing.
