John Robert Baker

I am a Masters student in the Geography department at the University at Buffalo. My principal research interests lie at the nexus of sustainability and public transportation. I seek to employ system dynamics, agent-based and mixed-method models in order to conceptualize and enact a future of sustainable societies as well as to improve shared understanding of how public transportation and personal vehicles interact. My central concern is the dynamics of physical and virtual urban networks, particularly those relating to road and rail infrastructure, and how these dynamics interact with virtual and physical space to shape and reshape the urban environment. This expansive notion of urban networks overlaps with notions of human-machine hybridity and the interplay between humans and the built environment.

A related interest is in the economics of urban areas, particularly such externalities as the “hidden”, or assumed and relatively unquantified cost of automobiles and the respective benefits of public transportation. My most recent projects involve employing GIS to examine notions of food deserts in Buffalo, NY, and exploring the “blowback”, or secondary effects of congestion pricing in New York City. My background includes teaching English as a second language in New York City and the Czech Republic, and a bachelor’s degree in the Comparative History of Ideas from the University of Washington, where I studied collective memory, particularly in relation hybrid forms of historical narrative, as all as to matter and myth in Iceland.

My contact information is johnrobe@buffalo.edu