Community Mapping Project Begins < Students Nai Yu Chen (left) and Emily Eng (right) and community member Greg Edblom (center) enter data about a city tree into their GIS-enabled personal digital assistant.

By Marc Schlossberg
Last Saturday, a powerful event happened. My students became teachers, neighborhood residents became experts, a neighborhood became a classroom, and learning became fun.

Students from the UO partnered with resident members of the West University Neighbors to map the neighborhood based on what its residents deem important. While students were fulfilling requirements of their "Social Planning and Geographic Information System (GIS)" class in the Department of Planning, Public Policy and Management (PPPM), the event was much more than a technical exercise.

The service-learning and action-research approaches to this mapping project have led to a number of benefits.

For students, the project represented a hands-on educational activity that combined new tools discussed in the classroom with a real-world opportunity to apply them. Among these tools and skills was mobile GIS that includes global positioning software and the capacity to collect data directly in a field mapping environment using handheld computers. The incorporation of mobile GIS into the curriculum makes this one of the only classes nationwide to utilize field-based mapping for community empowerment applications.

The second benefit accrued to neighborhood residents—the collection of neighborhood-based spatial data -- in this case, the location and description of city trees, street lights, and dumpsters. With the data collected, the community can begin to understand the spatial patterns of important community assets and develop appropriate strategies for addressing any gaps that exist.

New relationships and a breakdown of stereotypes were a third key benefit of this project. Twelve student-resident teams were responsible for mapping a sub-section of the neighborhood. During the six-hour day (which included pizza donated by Pegasus Pizza), students and residents were able to get to know each other in a way not normally possible. Perhaps the most heartening example of these new bonds was the fact that students instantaneously became teachers of neighborhood residents with the new mobile GIS technology.

The project was made possible by a small seed grant from the Northwest Academic Computing Consortium and is part of a continuing effort to utilize the resources and expertise inherent within the UO for the service of our surrounding community.

Schlossberg is an assistant professor in the Department of Planning, Public Policy and Management.


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