by Jabari A.S Lottie

This semester, I have been taking a Community GIS course that has deepened my understanding of how Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can serve as a tool for communication, storytelling, and empowerment within communities. My coursework has focused on Brooklyn Cemetery, a historically significant burial site for Black families in Athens, Georgia. Through mapping, spatial analysis, and assessing data integrity, I have begun to recognize the critical gap between what geospatial data reveals and what it omits.
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Brooklyn Cemetery, like many historically Black cemeteries, has faced decades of neglect due to systemic racial and economic injustices. While GIS offers valuable tools for mapping and preservation, it cannot fully capture the depth of historical and cultural narratives embedded in such spaces. This realization has challenged my initial perception of GIS as a neutral, purely analytical tool. Instead, I now see it as a medium for participatory engagement and advocacy.
GIS as a Tool for Community Problem-Solving
 
Engaging with “Doing Community Geography” (Shannon & Walker, 2018) and other foundational texts has expanded my perspective on how GIS can be applied to address real-world community issues. The concept of Public Participation GIS (PPGIS) (Sieber, 2006) emphasizes that GIS should not be limited to experts but instead serve as a platform where communities can contribute geographic data, challenge dominant narratives, and influence decision-making. The application of GIS in Brooklyn Cemetery illustrates how geospatial tools can be used to restore historically significant sites by mapping burial locations, overlaying historical maps with current land use data, and integrating oral histories.
 
Beyond historical preservation, GIS has broader applications in addressing pressing social and environmental issues. It can be used to analyze urban inequalities, identify environmental injustices, and support participatory planning efforts. For instance, in marginalized communities, GIS can highlight disparities in access to public resources such as parks, transit, and grocery stores. It can also track patterns of gentrification and displacement, providing data-driven support for advocacy efforts. GIS, when combined with qualitative research methods like community mapping and oral histories, becomes a powerful tool for amplifying underrepresented voices and shaping more equitable planning decisions.
Power and Representation in GIS
 
A recurring theme in community-based GIS work is the issue of power dynamics, who collects data, who interprets it, and whose stories are included. As Sieber (2006) discusses, traditional GIS applications often privilege institutional perspectives, excluding community knowledge from the decision-making process. At Brooklyn Cemetery, this became evident when I met with Linda Elder Davis, a longtime Athens resident and co-founder of the Friends of Brooklyn Cemetery. While maps and datasets provided information on burial sites, they failed to capture the personal histories of those interred there or the impact of systemic neglect on the cemetery’s condition. Davis’s oral histories and local expertise provided essential context that GIS alone could not.
 
This experience reinforced the importance of Deliberative GIS, a model proposed by Schlossberg and Shuford (2005), which positions GIS as a collaborative decision-making tool rather than merely a spatial analysis tool. Deliberative GIS encourages ongoing community participation, ensuring that residents actively shape projects rather than passively receiving pre-determined plans. This shift in perspective challenges the traditional top-down approach to urban planning and underscores the need for equity in spatial decision-making.
Rethinking the Role of GIS in Planning
 
Initially, I viewed GIS as a means for technical analysis, a way to visualize data, model spatial relationships, and guide decision-making. However, this course has reshaped my understanding of GIS as a narrative tool, one that can bridge the gap between data and lived experience. GIS should not simply document existing conditions but also facilitate dialogue, empower communities, and support social justice initiatives.
 
As I move forward in my career as a planner, I anticipate using GIS in ways that prioritize community engagement and participatory decision-making. Rather than solely relying on quantitative data, I aim to integrate qualitative storytelling methods, such as oral histories and participatory mapping, to ensure that planning efforts reflect the needs and perspectives of those directly affected. This shift in thinking acknowledges the ethical responsibilities of using GIS, recognizing that spatial data is never neutral and that maps have the power to shape narratives and policies.
 
Brooklyn Cemetery serves as a compelling case study for the transformative potential of GIS when applied through a justice-oriented lens. It demonstrates that GIS, when used thoughtfully, can be more than a technical tool, it can be an instrument for recovery, resilience, and representation in historically marginalized communities.

References:
 
Elwood, S. (2008). Volunteered geographic information: Future research directions motivated by critical,          participatory, and feminist GIS. GeoJournal, 72(3-4), 173-183.
Harvey, D. (2001). Cartographic identities: Social representation and geographic information systems.               Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 91(1), 1-11.
Schlossberg, M., & Shuford, E. (2005). Deliberative GIS: GIS as a tool to support community decision-               making. URISA Journal, 16(2), 15-29.
Shannon, J., & Walker, J. (2018). Doing Community Geography: Lessons from Case Studies. Routledge.
Sieber, R. (2006). Public participation geographic information systems: A literature review and                           framework. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 96(3), 491-507.

by Olivia Yahne

This semester my classmates and I are participating in a service-learning course in which our objective is to research and compile information about the individuals/families of those buried in the Brooklyn Cemetery here in Athens-Clarke County. While we have spent a majority of the semester in the lab, collecting and compiling data, we have also completed our first site visit to Brooklyn Cemetery in order to get a better understanding of the environment we are researching. Our class then split into groups, dividing up the family plots, so we each had specific people to research, and my group was assigned the Cole/Woodall family which consists of six individuals. We began this course by interacting with some readings by Donna Haraway, Norström, and Cunliffe and Karunanayake to gain a better understanding of why this project is important, how we can provide unbiased information when conducting a project like this, and how our findings will affect the Brooklyn Cemetery community. The next week we spent familiarizing ourselves with the project (and what we hope to achieve with it), data we would be utilizing for this course, and dusting off our GIS skills (mainly in QGIS).

I can’t speak for the rest of my classmates, but the first few classes I truly got a sense of how important this project was simply regarding the lack of information available to us when trying to collect data. In addition, once we completed our trip at the Brooklyn Cemetery, I was surprised at the conditions the environment was in; the littered pathway, the lack of identification markers, and the outside factors such as the school and house plotted on the sides of the cemetery. The next few classes consisted of more focused research, where we personally looked into a specific family to create a solid foundation to ensure our baseline data (conducted by previous members of this GIS course) was correct and once that was ensured we broke into our small groups. We have utilized FamilySearch, Athens city directories, Ancestry library edition, photos, etc. to compile background information about the individuals of our specific families including information ranging from their date/place of birth to how many hours they worked per week or if they could read/write. These past few classes have been wrapping up this compilation of data and our next steps will entail creating a digital archive and map of Brooklyn Cemetery.

This course and project have been particularly interesting to me as a lot of the recent classes I’ve taken have revolved around the “othering” of individuals/groups which is often prevalent in the landscape of these communities. It is evident with the geography of Brooklyn Cemetery as the conditions reveal past and continued acts of discrimination and prejudice, yet the current day efforts highlight the strive to preserve, improve, and empower the cemetery and the community. A particular class that stood out to me was when Dr. Shannon had Ms. Linda Elder Davis, the cofounder of the Friends of Brooklyn Cemetery community group, come speak to us about her experiences within the cemetery and its community. Her insights and connections provided valuable information that could not be obtained through digital archives in which she even provided contacts of certain descendants still in the area who might be able to provide further data. Her efforts and dedication once again drove home for me how important this project and service-learning projects as a whole are to communities on a multitude of scales.

In addition, a class that stuck out to me was the day after we did our first site visit to Brooklyn Cemetery where we discussed the experience. The conversation pertaining to the abundance of trees and the concealing canopy was a particularly interesting discussion as some people found that the number of trees further added to the concealment and secretion of the cemetery and the community it serves. Others felt like the opposite was true, that the trees not only added to the quiet beauty of the cemetery but also represented continuation of life and resilience regarding the intertwining of the gravesites and the trees. This project has provided me with readings that have expanded my understanding of the work geographers do and why they do it, the opportunity to improve my technical GIS skills by broadening my knowledge of software such as QGIS, and the ability to create something that will positively influence a historic landmark and the community involved. I am grateful for this opportunity and am looking forward to continuing to expand the archives available for Brooklyn Cemetery as well as helping restore a sense of identity in the community. 

Olivia Yahne is an undergraduate student majoring in Geography and Disaster Management. 

Keywords: Brooklyn Cemetery, data, research

by Logan Wiley 

I love cemeteries – they make me feel grounded, connected to some deep historical truth. For the greater part of my second year as an undergraduate, I ran every morning through Oconee Hill Cemetery near my residence hall. I remember spiraling up the path around the tallest point and reading the names on the obelisks sticking out from the summit: Lumpkin, Hull, and others found elsewhere on building facades and street signs around the University of Georgia (UGA) campus and surrounding city of Athens. Even in death, elevation represents recognition; at the historically Black Brooklyn Cemetery a few miles away from Oconee Hill, neglected gravesites sink into the earth.
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The racial inequalities between the burial grounds of Athens define this year’s Community Geographic Information Systems (CGIS) course at UGA, which focuses on the families buried in Brooklyn Cemetery. Joining my classmates and instructors to familiarize ourselves with the space, I arrived at the cemetery on a cool sunny afternoon. Ten minutes early, I walked from end-to-end and back – the grounds are relatively small and have shrunk over time. Even now, you feel a sense of encroachment from a residence, a church, and the newly-built Clarke Middle School on the north end of the eleven-acre plot. According to Ms. Linda Davis, the co-founder of the Friends of Brooklyn Cemetery, numerous people are likely buried under the buildings that dot the perimeter. A small “Black Lives Matter” banner on the side of the house facing the paths indicates to me that the residents are aware of their position next to (or maybe on top of) a Black cemetery. I passed a church member talking on the phone and another early classmate before reaching the fence separating the cemetery from the school. Thanks to the new construction, you can see clear across the massive parking lot to one of the more-frequented areas of Athens: a shopping mall with a Kroger, some clothing stores, and a fitness center. It feels like the cemetery is surrounded by a force slowly exposing what Ms. Linda calls “sacred ground”. What happens when a burial site moves from being ignored and neglected to being acknowledged and still neglected?

As Katherine McKittrick highlights in her piece Plantation Futures, encroachment, disinvestment, and neglect of Black spaces become normalized, commonsense, and inevitable. For decades, Brooklyn Cemetery was left behind, with its stories allowed to fade into the past. Eventually, developers regarded the space as lifeless despite it holding so many lives – In 2006, Ms. Linda joined a teacher at the adjacent school to defend the cemetery from replacement by a playground. Lacking stable funding, the cemetery relies on volunteers like Ms. Linda to prevent the normalization of the cemetery’s relative disrepair and push back against those waiting to build over the forested gravesites.
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Despite the sunken earth, broken headstones, and PVC-pipe markers of the unnamed interred individuals, Brooklyn Cemetery is beautiful. On that January morning, our procession passed under tall, strong pine trees in silence, unbroken except for the crunching of leaves underfoot and laughter from middle-school sports, a reminder of the many generations present around us. Youth ministries, local volunteers, and student organizations from the surrounding high schools and universities visit the cemetery frequently, contributing to its upkeep under the guidance of Ms. Linda. Wooden signage to mark sections, clear maps in sturdy display cases, and stunning metalwork on the front gate all enhance the environment. Far from the narrative of lifelessness imposed upon the cemetery to smooth processes of development and piecemeal land seizure, walking through the grounds connected me to the broader streams of Athens’ history and the communal efforts to preserve, rebuild, and expand the cemetery.

This site visit is one of the first steps in our research process for this year’s CGIS class. As the semester continues, we will tell stories on those interred in the cemetery, focusing on Black Athenian families and their paths through the city across generations. On our walking tour, we passed many of these family plots, full of rich threads that we will later follow in the computer lab through census records, death certificates, and obituaries. Our maps, stories, and data will follow the broader process of opening Brooklyn Cemetery to the surrounding space; I am still learning how to ensure that our work celebrates and properly acknowledges family histories. Given the establishment of the cemetery in 1882, some people buried there have almost definitely become invisible; perhaps under the fingers of development at the cemetery edges, or unmarked by headstone, PVC pipe, or sunken earth. For those documented, we are responsible for carefully and respectfully telling their stories - to the classroom and then to the broader community. In this course, we will join the long line of others before us in caring for the cemetery, doing our best to make sure it doesn’t sink away from the story of Athens.

Logan Wiley is an undergraduate at UGA majoring in Geography and Psychology. He has been working in the Community Mapping Lab for the last three years.

Keywords: Positionality, Black cemeteries, Black Athens, disinvestment, development

by Holden McCullough 

This semester, I have had the privilege of participating in a service-learning course at UGA involving Brooklyn Cemetery in Athens. The service component of this course is important to me as I seek to be a part of community-based projects both personally and professionally. Through my background as a landscape architect, I am particularly interested in the positionality of place, meaning the spectrum of perspectives held by people of different life experiences. I feel drawn to Brooklyn Cemetery and the many meanings that this landscape holds to the individuals who have ties to this symbolic place.
I believe that the landscape is indicative of who we are, who we have been, and who we will become. The landscape of Brooklyn Cemetery is an intricate museum of past injustices, present day dedication and perseverance, and hope for the future. However, these sensations are simply from my personal perspective. Being in the cemetery for the first time reminded me that people experience different emotions and draw contrasting meanings from the same landscape, especially one as complex as an African-American burial ground in the American south.

My first observation of being in the cemetery was how secluded it was. I enjoyed its private and relatively quiet atmosphere – away from any major sources of noise or disruption. It seemed to be a conducive environment for contemplation and emotional wandering. However, I did notice violations of the cemetery’s agency as a contemplative space. The most glaring of these was the house near the entrance, seemingly recently constructed, which imposed its presence into the ground physically, as well as over the greater sensation of privacy in the space. The school at the rear of the cemetery seemed to turn its back on the cemetery, as if to suggest that the cemetery was an inappropriate space to enter or acknowledge. The sight of the recently completed fence affirmed this sensation. I also noticed the various objects that were used to mark graves. Iron rods from machinery, PVC pipes, and decaying headstones marked graves all the same.

However, the great equalizer across the gravesites was the presence of a strong canopy of trees. To me this was the most marked departure from what would be considered a typical cemetery. I found a great depth of meaning in the trees, given that they had intricately intertwined their root systems with each other and the remains of those buried beneath the ground. To me it is symbolic that these people whose lives once were intertwined on this earth are still presently communing amongst each other through the trees. I found it to be a beautiful manifestation of the promise of life after death and that protecting the tree canopy was necessary to retain this meaning.

However, mine is not the only valid perspective. A conversational debrief after the visit revealed that several of my peers had different experiences. Some felt that the secluded nature of the cemetery was an effort to intentionally hide it from view, thus further erasing the legacy of African Americans in the Athen’s landscape. Others felt that the trees were a symbol of the lack of general management of the cemetery, and this further reflected the prolonged injustices experienced by black members of the community. Honestly, I did not disagree with these perspectives. My peers’ experiences were not my own, but this does not make them incorrect in the slightest. Positionality was taking shape within our small group of observers. Furthermore, none of us have a personal connection to this cemetery or anyone buried within it. Who are we to impose our outsider perspectives on a space that has a depth of meaning to the community who is personally connected to the cemetery? This leads me to my broader question: how do we respect the positionality of the Brooklyn Cemetery community in our work this semester?
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This question is of paramount importance to me as we are simply an outsider group of individuals participating in this project for a short period of time in its much longer history and future. I have been dedicating a lot of thought to what position we should take when conducting our research as we document the story of this landscape and its people. This project has led me to adopt a new way of thinking about the landscape, especially the landscapes that I get to touch as a designer. My lived experiences are simply a narrow window into a much broader matrix of perspectives and perceptions. Trying to see outside of my personal understanding and into others has presented a new and important challenge as someone who has the qualification to draw implied meanings from the landscape and alter its physical characteristics accordingly. I foresee that this change in my positionality will have resounding impacts on my service oriented ambitions in this class and in the future.

by Aaron Castro 

This semester, I have had the privilege of taking Community GIS with Dr. Shannon. With it being my first service learning class, I was unsure of what I was signing myself up for. Is this about GIS? Are we going to have active engagement with Athens communities? After learning about the subject of the class, Brooklyn Cemetery, which is a historically black cemetery here in Athens, I realized that this class was going to be more fulfilling than I could have imagined. For context, not only have I been eager to engage with an Athens community/communities, but I recently have gotten interested in the history of Athens as well. In groups, we have been tasked with accumulating data for our respective family plots utilizing various sources online. These include census tracts, city directories, Ancestry pages, and more. Though I have not had much experience with data scourging before, I am enjoying the experience thus far and has proved to be beneficial to my development in working within collaborative group settings.
 
My group's assigned family is the Cole/Woodall family. The initial database for this family had many missing fields which were necessary for further research. These can be things like birth years, death years, and even links between the two families. As a class, we came to an agreement to make a uniform list of data fields to uncover. I was definitely eager to begin our research. Our group decided to split the hefty workload into sources, as opposed to splitting it by the names of the individuals. I was in charge of scouring Athens city directories for information including occupations, employers, residential addresses, and whether they owned or rented their properties. These city directories date all the way back to 1889 so it was time to get to work.
 
Searching these city directories takes lots of time and effort to get every bit of information they provide. Certain abbreviations are listed next to the names of individuals that can represent either their race, occupation, or their tenure to their residence. I found it beneficial to keep a screenshot of the list of abbreviations located within the first few pages of the directories for reference. Working with lots of data in different groups is challenging due to the fact that everyone's formatting preferences will be different. Currently, we are working on getting the class’s data formatted in unison as to correctly display the data correctly. As I combed through every listed city directory provided by the University of Georgia’s digital library, I began to think about how this data does not tell the story of these people and their families. Sure, this data provides info on where these people lived and worked, but what about their personalities, goals, accomplishments, and early lives?
 
This is where the class's data collection is going to come to life. With census tracts, city directories, and other online resources, ArcGIS StoryMaps will be created to give our respective families some background. I have personally never made my own StoryMap, but have seen others’ maps in other geography classes and I am eager to see how they turn out. What I said before, about the data not having any life, will soon be moved into a lively display of the histories of these families. I think what I am most excited about is to give people that have attachment to these families a visual of data that they may not have been able to replicate.
 
I am hoping that when our data collection is complete, and maps are created, that the stories of these families are represented in the best manner to the community. I am keeping in mind that there is life behind this data and should be treated with the utmost respect. 

Aaron is a 4th year geography major pursuing certificates in GIS and urban/metropolitan studies.

Keywords: GIS, Communities, Data, Athens

By Logan Wiley

Last month, my labmate Annie and I presented our research on the Athens eviction landscape at UGA’s annual Center for Undergraduate Research (CURO) Symposium. We had spent many of our research hours in two places: at the Athens Magistrate Court Office digitizing eviction files or in the Community Mapping Lab entering data into our online dashboard. So, discussing our work with professors, community partners, and other student researchers offered a refreshing and rewarding culmination of our effort during the semester. Our poster focused on the relationship between eviction filing and non-local property ownership, visualized by our map of eviction hotspots in the county and filings identified by non-local and local ownership. Through my work on the project this year, I developed my understanding of mapping’s role in analyzing housing inequities but also realized that our maps lack many of the causes and contexts necessary for addressing these issues.

Our updated map of eviction filing hotspots and rental property ownership showed four eviction hotspots dispersed in west, east, and north Athens. Most of these hotspots concentrate around apartment complexes including Lexington Heights, Arbor Ridge Apartments, and Hidden Pines Apartments. Based on my readings of the files, tenants often receive an eviction affidavit after being late or partially behind on rent due to job loss or temporary illness. From my perspective, eviction filings exacerbate housing insecurity in impoverished areas of Athens and perpetuate income inequality. Along with updating our visualization of the eviction hotspots, we wanted to analyze how nonlocal property speculation affects housing insecurity in Athens by investigating the business locations of evicting property owners. This analysis was overdue after the purchase of duplexes by non-local investment company Prosperity Capital Partners led to rent increases and displacement for low-income Athens tenants in June 2022.

I would like to expand analysis of nonlocal property ownership to include some statistical analysis, but for this poster we conducted preliminary examination and visualization of nonlocal speculation. Out of the twelve property owners with more than fifty evictions filed within their properties, nine of them are based outside of Georgia (75%). Prosperity Capital Partners dominates the list with more than 350 filings across their many Athens properties, equating to more than 10% of all eviction filings recorded within our period of analysis. The next highest evicting owner, Filmore Capital Partners, has about 175 filings recorded, half the amount of Prosperity Capital Partners. Even from these first analytical steps, it’s clear that non-local property speculation plays a role in displacement and must be considered for future policies and housing activism. The updated hotspot and nonlocal property ownership analysis produced engaging discussion before and during the conference, but I believe the next phase of the project must find a new community partner or expand our local network to properly use our data and inform organizations addressing the housing crisis. Mapping where evictions occur has been an important foundation for the project; now, we must expand analysis on why evictions occur and how we can address displacement in our community.

So far, we have worked well with the local government and the activist group Athens Housing Advocacy Team (AHAT), but I feel that the project lacks the experiences of tenants experiencing the housing crisis. Although still vague, I hope to help include more community perspectives in further analysis, possibly through alternative mapping methods or explorations of the roles of gender, race, and language in the experience of housing insecurities. After developing a strong research network in the Community Mapping Lab and learning practical skills through geospatial analysis and visualization, I feel confident to identify and fill in the blind spots of our current eviction analysis.

Logan Wiley is an undergraduate at UGA majoring in Geography and Psychology. He has been working in the CML for the last two years.

By Daniel Klein, Community GIS student in Spring 2024

This spring in Community GIS, we are working on a report that explores ongoing changes to the historically Black neighborhood of Inner East Athens (IEA), and the difficulties and disparities that its residents face. As we began work on this project, our 19-strong class of student geographers split into more focused subgroups, with each person being assigned a specific role in their respective group. My group, Demographics, is using data from the U.S. Census Bureau to look at the current demographic characteristics of IEA, compare the neighborhood to the rest of Athens, and assess how the area has changed over the last five to ten years. My role is the Cartography and Visualization lead, which means I am in charge of taking data and creating the final visuals that will complement our written report.

When I found out that I was assigned this position, I was admittedly relieved. I wouldn’t have to deal with the headaches inevitably engendered by finding data sources, wrestling those data files into something we could use, or dealing with finicky functions in GIS software. I would get to do the fun stuff, the thing that most people assume you do all day when you say you study geography—make maps. However, once I started mapping, I was met with a series of difficult choices surrounding how exactly I would visualize my group’s findings, stemming from one cartographic truism: there are umptillion possible ways to visualize the same data, and unfortunately for all of us, there’s no “correct” method.
 
Take some of the dilemmas I faced as I tried to complete this task, which I thought would be simple. First, I wondered whether I should even use a map to represent some of our findings. Might a graph or a table be better? And if I make a map, should I show data at the census block group level, or the less granular census tract level? On one hand, displaying block groups could pinpoint hotspots of rapid demographic change, but with such a fine analysis, a viewer might miss the forest for the trees and not see the broader trends in IEA. 
 
Another area of confusion was the best way to demonstrate change over time. For instance, one question my group wanted to answer is how the number of IEA residents who are enrolled in college has changed over time, as increasing numbers of college-enrolled individuals might be a sign that an influx of student housing and students is forcing out long-time residents. But when comparing the percent of college-enrolled residents in 2022 and 2012, should I visualize the change in percent or the percent change for each block group? The former is easier to understand, but it wouldn’t highlight areas of exponential change. A block group that increases by a factor of six from 4% to 24% would look the same as one that increases from 75% to 95%, but the first is far more interesting for my group’s purposes than the second. Meanwhile, showing the percent change would call attention to rapid increases or decreases, but is less intuitive for the viewer—“percent change in percents” is almost as hard to understand as it is to say out loud.

These visualization choices, despite how trivial they probably seem, became more serious when I considered the way our work may be used in the future. For once, my cartographic choices would not be contained to the shelter of a university course; instead, they would be showcased to the broader public. Not to overstate my own importance, but whether or not my maps effectively communicated our findings could play some small role in our community partners’ ability to secure grants, or whether policymakers view the ongoing changes in IEA as important.
 
The solution to these issues at which I arrived: make the visualization choices that convey the points you want to emphasize. It’s vague, it’s disappointingly ad hoc, but it’s the only remedy that will work in all cases. Every research question is different, and there’s no singular best practice for all projects.
 
In one’s maps, you must balance a kind of internal and external validity: Does your visualization faithfully depict the results of your analysis? And does it authentically  depict what is occurring in the “real world”? Sometimes, you have to sacrifice one of these qualities for the other, like the earlier discussion of change in percent vs. percent change. In the end, I opted to show changes in percent because I prioritized digestibility, even though areas of rapid change might appear muted. But another researcher, working on a different project, trying to make a different point might choose otherwise. That’s okay—just be aware of the implications on what the reader will take home from your conclusions.
 
All maps tell a story. But some stories are more useful than others.

Keywords: Cartography, visualization, research
 
Bio: Daniel Klein is a fourth-year studying International Affairs, with minors in Sociology and Political Science and a certificate in Geographic Information Sciences. After graduating in spring 2024, he plans to explore employment in the field of public opinion research before ultimately pursuing a PhD in political science.

By Sana Ullah, Spring 2024 Community GIS Student

As someone deeply rooted in community projects and passionate about leveraging technology for positive social change, the intersection of community GIS (Geographic Information Systems) and addressing complex issues like food security holds immense significance to me. With a background in agricultural development and rural communities, I understand the transformative power of collaborative efforts in tackling pressing challenges. In this blog post, I aim to explore the importance of community GIS, drawing upon my experiences and highlighting the role of the Community GIS course offered at the Geography department of the University of Georgia (UGA) in addressing food security, particularly in the context of Inner East Athens, Georgia. My journey in community projects began in the fertile fields of rural landscapes in Pakistan, where I witnessed firsthand the resilience and ingenuity of local communities in overcoming agricultural challenges. Working alongside rural farmers and community leaders, I learned the importance of participatory approaches in sustainable development initiatives. From implementing local food systems to promoting improved farming practices, I witnessed the transformative impact of empowering communities with the tools and knowledge to shape their own destinies.


Community GIS emerged as a powerful tool in my PhD career at UGA, offering a spatial lens through which to understand and address complex socio-environmental issues. By harnessing geospatial data and community input, GIS enables stakeholders to visualize patterns, identify disparities, and co-create solutions tailored to local contexts. From mapping land use patterns to analyzing socio-economic indicators, GIS empowers communities to make informed decisions and advocate for change. GIS empowers communities because analyzing data such as demographic data of an aera through GIS techniques can provide us with some significant information that could be used by local government, NGOs, and other stakeholders to shape policies and implement project for the development of the area. The Community GIS course offered at the Geography department of UGA stands at the nexus of theory and practice, equipping students with the skills and knowledge to leverage GIS for community-driven initiatives. Through hands-on projects and engagement with local partners, students explore the potential of GIS as a tool for social justice and environmental stewardship. By bridging the gap between academia and community action, the course cultivates a new generation of change-makers poised to tackle real-world challenges.


Inner East Athens, like many urban areas globally, grapples with the complex interplay of gentrification and the accessibility of nutritious food. As someone deeply rooted in agricultural practices and rural development, I recognize the critical importance of sustaining local food systems while navigating the challenges posed by rapid urbanization and climate change. This class blog is trying to highlight the importance of food security Inner East Athens because there are some reasons that cause it such as gentrification and studentification. Food security goes beyond mere access to food; it encompasses availability, access, utilization, and stability of food sources. Inner East Athens, historically vibrant with diverse communities, now faces the repercussions of gentrification, altering the socio-economic fabric and influencing food accessibility. Gentrification often leads to rising living costs, displacing low-income residents and disrupting their access to affordable and nutritious food. Gentrification reshapes neighborhoods and alters the challenges and opportunities for businesses for the local communities. This transition often marginalizes existing communities, exacerbating food insecurity among vulnerable populations. As property values soar, traditional residents are priced out of their neighborhoods, disrupting social networks and community cohesion vital for collective food security initiatives.


The challenges faced in inner East Athens echo across urban landscapes worldwide. Cities serve as epicenters of economic activity, attracting diverse populations seeking livelihood opportunities. However, rapid urbanization often outpaces infrastructure development, leading to food deserts and unequal distribution of resources. From New York to Nairobi, urban areas grapple with the dual challenge of food security and gentrification, underscoring the need for holistic interventions. Due to various socio-economic transformations in IEA, local initiatives and ideas can help tackle the community problems such as community gardens, urban farming cooperatives, and farmers' markets reclaim vacant lots and public spaces, fostering local food production and strengthening community resilience. One of the examples is Rashe who is very passionate about the development and prosperity of her community people.  These initiatives not only promote food sovereignty but also foster social inclusion and environmental sustainability. Effective policy frameworks are essential for addressing the root causes of food insecurity and gentrification. Governments must prioritize inclusive urban planning, ensuring equitable access to land and resources for small-scale farmers and marginalized communities. Zoning regulations should encourage mixed-income neighborhoods and protect cultural heritage, preserving traditional food systems and culinary diversity.


Creating resilient food systems requires collaboration across sectors, including government agencies, civil society organizations, and private enterprises. Partnerships that leverage local knowledge and global expertise can catalyze impactful interventions, fostering holistic approaches to food security and urban development. Empowering communities to lead their own initiatives promotes ownership and sustainability, fostering a sense of collective responsibility towards nourishing communities. As I embark on this journey at the intersection of community projects and GIS, I am excited by the possibilities that lie ahead. Through collaborations with local stakeholders, including community organizations, government agencies, and academic institutions like UGA, I am confident that we can leverage the power of GIS to create positive change in Inner East Athens and beyond. By harnessing technology as a force for social good, we can build more resilient, inclusive, and sustainable communities where everyone has access to nutritious food and opportunities for a better future. I had the opportunity to work with a dedicated group of people in my class project on gentrification. We found that due to gentrification the prices go high, and people become more vulnerable due to low socio-economic situations. I also listened to other group projects, and it was interesting to know how businesses, properties along with gentrification impact local people influencing their daily life and accessibility to food.

Bio: Sana Ullah is a third year PhD student of interdisciplinary agricultural education. He is focusing on small farmers’ access to information and resources about adaptation strategies to climate change. Mr. Sana is passionate about community empowerment through participatory research and agricultural development.

Keywords: Communities, GIS, Gentrification, Food security, Inner East Athens

By Nicholas Lounsbury, Spring 2024 Community GIS Student

Much of my learning in my undergraduate path came from the Community Geographic Information Science course led by Dr. Jerry Shannon. This course spends a lot of time collaborating to assist local community members. In past semesters most Geography courses for me were following directions from an assignment sheet to create maps in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software but this course was different. This course is much more about the research and development part of GIS that I’ve never had to deal with before; in the past professors would just give us cleaned-up data and tell us how to visualize it. But this course spent the most of its time allowing us the opportunity to see what goes into the background of community-based GIS work including interactions with community members as well as processing and visualizing data to fit our research purposes. I spent the majority of this semester working with my classmates and with feedback from community partners to research the neighborhood of Inner East Athens, a neighborhood that has long been ignored by Athens government officials and is undergoing gentrification as residents get driven out by rich renters seeking affordable housing. A big part of the community research process in my project was communicating with a resident of the Inner East Athens (IEA) community, Rashe Malcolm, a local restaurant owner and county commissioner candidate. Malcolm voiced her concerns with her neighborhood as well as project goals she wants to achieve for the community. By sharing information between our two groups we can gain a more comprehensive understanding of the community to more easily address the plans Malcolm has in mind. This process is known as the co-production of knowledge, where information is shared between groups to achieve a more relevant and beneficial outcome from research for both parties involved. We had multiple meetings with Rashe Malcom to get an understanding of what she wants from us, using our technical experience with GIS, as well as to get feedback so the work we do is relevant and useful to her. This kind of back and forth community interaction is something I never got from another GIS or geography course and provides a clear insight into what community-focused GIS work could really be like, which is a lot of planning and brainstorming meetings. Throughout much of Community GIS’s course we spent time split up into separate groups tackling issues we pointed out with the community including matters like food access, property ownership, and gentrification, the last of which I spent my time working on. As I stated before, past geography courses I took revolved around being given data and being told what to do with it, but here we don’t have that luxury as we must learn to gather and apply the data ourselves in a way we think would best assist the community. We had many meetings just going over ways we can display the risks of gentrification to the East Athens neighborhood which involved finding articles of past efforts to visualize gentrification to modify to best fit our purposes. We discovered a few variables such as economic vulnerability, demographic change, and housing sales price changes to be the best way we can achieve this goal of greater understanding of gentrification risk. To get most of this data we downloaded census information and spent time in Excel cleaning up the data to prepare it for GIS software visualization. It took a surprising amount of time just processing a few datasets to prepare for GIS work. This data processing work is something most of us never did before even if we had past GIS classes because the datasets usually come prepared for GIS software already, so learning how to format data on our own was a valuable and eye-opening learning experience. I believe this course was a valuable insight into behind-the-scenes work that goes into geographic research beyond the obvious map-making endeavor that is only the tip of the iceberg and final touches to a community project that spanned multiple months of collaborative and independent work.

Bio: Nicholas Lounsbury is a fifth-year undergraduate Geography student passionate about urban planning and transportation issues. Having spent time in his undergraduate path learning about GIS techniques and cooperative research, Nicholas plans to use those skills outside of college after he graduates later this year

Keywords: Communities, GIS, Inner East Athens, Gentrification, Research, Co-Production, Data

References:

Norström, Albert V., et al. “Principles for Knowledge Co-production in Sustainability Research.” Nature Sustainability, vol. 3, no. 3, Jan. 2020, pp. 182–90. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-019-0448-2.

By Shaifali Prajapati, Spring 2024 Community GIS Student

I’m currently a student in the Community GIS class, pursuing my first year as a PhD Geography major at the University of Georgia. Even before attending UGA, learning about the ongoing work Dr. Jerry Shannon’s Community GIS class has been doing with the Linnentown Project made the course stand out to me. Students across different iterations of classes each year were able to utilize GIS as part of efforts to bring the stories of the people of and connected to Linnentown to the surface. I was intrigued to hear about a course that strives to integrate service-learning and GIS together, guided by community mapping and critical GIS. While I took several GIS courses as a Geography major in undergrad, all of them focused on learning to use various associated software through projects meant to emulate topics students would use for layered spatial analyses geared towards industry job prospects. Beyond completing deliverables for the labs, there was a lack of instruction in understanding why and how these processes were carried out. Considering all of these factors, I had set my sights to take this class if I ever attended.
 
For this semester’s Community GIS class we’re working with community partner Rashe Malcolm, the local business owner of Rashe’s Cuisine located right in the Triangle Plaza area of Inner East Athens. We’re developing a project to aid in her proposal to revitalize Inner East Athens with consideration to the already-established culture and demographics in the neighborhood. As part of this project, we are working to provide a profile of Inner East Athens through mapping current demographic and business dynamics, processes of studentification (similar to gentrification in which the needs of student populations of higher education institutions drive social, cultural, and economic displacement of local residents), property ownership and food access affecting the area (Pickren 2012).
 
While I’ve had prior experience working on community-based mapping, it is through this class that I’ve been able to take part in the praxis of community geography by applying critical theories of mapping with a critical lens on GIS through attention to conducting inclusive research. This blog itself is one aspect of this ongoing process to critically reflect on the implications of our work. So far, we’ve discussed and reflected on being conscious of using GIS through a critical lens. One of the core ideas we’ve been paying attention to is avoiding extractive (extraction of knowledge and resources) research and instead striving to carry out inclusive (mutually beneficial) research that examines implications of the research we’re doing for the people and places that are being studied. Some of the ways we’ve been conscious of these implications are through conducting interviews with prominent local figures also advocating for Inner East Athens to gain their perspectives on the prospects of revitalization as well as key concerns affecting the area. We also took a trip to learn about the Inner East Athens community and the historical legacy of Triangle Plaza from Rashe. As Rashe was guiding us through locations where she was planning for revitalization by building a community garden, grocery store, and affordable housing, I was able to situate myself in the actual locations we’ll be collecting data for and have a more nuanced understanding of local business owners and residents from Rashe’s perspective.
What stuck with me most during this visit is Rashe pointing out murals dedicated to women in the neighborhood that were commemorated for their strong community leadership, and her dedication to continue those efforts as a community leader herself.
 
With these informed perspectives in mind as well as our own perspectives of being students and residents of Athens, we are using our skill sets as a class by researching, compiling, and presenting spatial dynamics that Rashe has requested for her plans of continuing development in this community. Throughout this process, I really appreciate having discussions with Rashe as a class because it gives us the opportunity to hear her thoughts directly and time for us to ask questions. Additionally, getting feedback from her and the interviewed local figures on our project deliverables has been an integral part of approaching work with a critical perspective centered on community partners through working with informed perspectives and having strong communication. My hope is that our project is helpful to Rashe and that future classes can continue working with her in her goals to revitalize Inner East Athens, and I’m curious to see how the project develops and changes over time as well as how Inner East Athens is viewed and the people residing there view their neighborhood themselves.
 
Presently, as we’re nearing the end of class, I’m glad to be able to take part in this unique blend of learning and practicing GIS. While it can help with job prospects through the project management skills we’ve gained as a class along with learning how to use GIS software and carrying out spatial analyses, the goal throughout the semester to me has been to guide students to critically consider the impacts of what it means to be “doing community geography ” (Fischer 2022).
 
 
Keywords: community mapping, Critical GIS praxis and pedagogy, inclusive research

References:
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Fischer, H., Block, D., Bosse, A., Hawthorne, T. L., Jung, J. K., Pearsall, H., ... & Shannon, J. (2022). Doing community geography. GeoJournal, 87(Suppl 2), 293-306.
 
Pickren, G. (2012). “Where Can I Build My Student Housing?”: The Politics of Studentification in Athens-Clarke County, Georgia. Southeastern Geographer, 52(2), 113–130. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26229005