Posted on Public Engagement blog by Victor Bloomfield on May 9, 2007

Chip Peterson, a geographer in the University of Minnesota's Learning Abroad Center and a member of our Council on Public Engagement, sent me an interesting Op-Ed piece entitled “Community Geography” from the March 2007 issue of the AAG (Association of American Geographers) Newsletter. The article was authored by Don Mitchell from Syracuse University.

The article describes how the Executive Director of a hot food program in downtown Syracuse contacted the Geography Department to ask whether the department could help to create a “Syracuse Hunger Project” (SHP) to “map the face of hunger in the city”. He suspected that the locus of hunger in the city had shifted over time, but that the social services needed to respond had not followed that shift. The piece goes on to describe how a GIS course was reoriented to make the issue a class project, and how, when

… the students’ maps were presented to SHP meetings, the whole tenor of the conversation changed. Those who had been working on hunger forever began to look at the problem in a new way. They saw that indeed thee were large-scale shifts in the geography of poverty … without a similar shift in service provisions. But even more importantly, they began to apprehend the importance of finer-scale geographies… This resulted in … a raising of critical questions about how entitlement programs like food stamps intersect with the social geographies of the city. … In instance after instance, the maps grounded what had heretofore been quite abstract discussions, providing a specific focus for discussion and debate.

full blog entry: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/victor/publicengagement/2007/05/community_geography.html