By Steven Peay, Community GIS Student in Spring 2024

I am a fourth-year geography major at the University of Georgia with certificate programs in Geographic Information Systems and Urban and Metropolitan Studies. This is my third semester at UGA. One of my classes is “Community GIS” and we are currently learning about the city of Athens outside of the university and downtown, specifically East Athens. Despite living on East Broad Street for over a year now, I have never visited East Athens until our class took a trip to Triangle Plaza last month in January. Rashe Malcolm, a local business owner and resident of East Athens, spoke to our class about her personal experience with studentification, housing prices, property taxes, and racial zoning.
           
East Athens, located immediately east of Downtown Athens, seems cut off from the rest of the city, even though Triangle Plaza in the center of the community is less than two miles from the UGA Arch. The neighborhood has a lot of old houses that could use some renovation, roads full of large cracks and potholes, with two small strip malls in the middle of the neighborhood. While some major roads of Athens go through this community, like East Broad Street and Arch Street, I saw very few people driving through East Athens, and Google Maps always directs me to take either North Avenue or Lexington Road when driving to either Atlanta or Lavonia. Most of the ACC bus routes drive around East Athens with few stops in the actual community, which is odd, as East Athens has a low median household income and likely also a low car ownership rate. I don’t want to jump to conclusions or make unreasonable claims, but it feels like I’m not supposed to know about this neighborhood and it is being hidden from people who live outside of Athens. When I first heard “East Athens” I originally thought of places like Georgetown Square in the eastern part of Athens-Clarke County near Winterville, rather than immediately east of downtown.
           
Rashe is the founder and CEO of Rashe’s Cuisine, a Jamaican soul food joint. She has run this small business for over 30 years and since not many people drive through East Athens, most orders are deliveries and takeout/pickup orders. During her speech to our class, she stated that many old houses are being destroyed to make space for new student housing, as the community is seen as “ghetto”, while most of the rest of Central Athens is seen as historic. Rashe wants a community garden and a grocery store in or near Triangle Plaza, as East Athens is a food desert, meaning there is no easy and affordable access to fresh fruits and vegetables, lean meat, bread, and dairy products. She also advocates for tax breaks on life-deed houses, or houses willed to their current occupants by previous generations. Most houses are owned by the current residents, but they can’t afford the rising property tax caused by gentrification, studentification, and inflation.
           
East Athens is a majority-black neighborhood and is a result of historic redlining and racial zoning, which has led to the community’s status as a food desert, poorly funded schools, little public transportation access, and poor infrastructure, leading to the high poverty rate, keeping the community underdeveloped. There is hope for this neighborhood, as people like Matthew Epperson and Imani Scott-Blackwell run non-profits to help integrate the isolated community with the rest of the city of Athens. They both work for Hivemind, a cooperative that strives to fight poverty and elevate low-income communities in Athens and surrounding counties.
           
I hope that using open-source and easily accessible GIS information the people of East Athens can make their voices heard and achieve funding for affordable housing and mixed-use business and apartment buildings for residents to live and work, more access to public transportation through East Athens, slower gentrification in the area to allow them to build wealth and afford to live, and eventually break barriers and “invisible walls” dividing them from the rest of the city. With the spread, popularity, and increasing access to the internet and public information, it has become much easier to find out more about how to find resources for rent/tax assistance, location of affordable housing, and local nonprofits. I am very optimistic that these goals can be reached, not only in East Athens, but in every low-income community in the United States still suffering from racist political and financial decisions made nearly a century ago, creating more integrated and united cities and localities, at the cost of no one’s life or financial prosperity.

By Brandon Latimer, Community GIS Student in Spring 2024

Community GIS is a class offered at the University of Georgia each spring semester and is taught by Dr. Jerry Shannon. As described on the Geography Department website, it is a course designed around a service-learning project that “[provides] GIS support for a group in the community.” I signed up to take the Community GIS class this semester with little idea of what it actually entailed. I was excited to apply GIS, a field I have been interested in throughout my time at UGA, to local issues. However, I had a poor understanding of what that work might look like. I came in eager to hop on the computer and begin to map whatever it was I needed. I quickly learned that this is just one small part of what community mapping projects, and research projects in general, look like. I will use the concept of knowledge co-production as an example of how my understanding of research has shifted.
 
Co-production emphasizes the importance of collaboration in order to create knowledge that incorporates a diverse set of information and experiences within relevant contexts. It is a holistic approach that attempts to limit partiality and maximize the positive impacts of knowledge production. Norström et al. (2020) write about the four fundamental aspects of knowledge co-production, noting that research should be context-based, pluralistic, goal-oriented, and interactive. Pluralistic and context-based work results in the implementation of a variety of skill sets and information to address a specific problem, along with the many contexts in which that problem exists. The research is goal-oriented in order to create a clearly defined objective for all involved parties to work towards. In order to do this, the work must be interactive, ensuring that everyone is involved throughout the entirety of the project. This guarantees that each party’s voice and expertise are accounted for.
 
As our class read about and discussed this concept at the start of the semester, I appreciated its emphasis on transdisciplinary research. However, it was still very early in the semester, and I was a little unclear about its role in our work. Once again, I was looking forward to just sitting down with some music and mapping out some local topics of interest. As the semester has progressed, we have learned more and more each week about what a community-based project entails, including our role in knowledge co-production. One of the most essential elements of this type of work is learning how to properly engage with community members in order to understand how we can best help each other.
 
Our specific task in the Community GIS course is to work with Rashe Malcolm, a business owner in East Athens. East Athens is a community that has long been neglected and mistreated. As the University of Georgia continues to grow practically across the street, East Athens remains less developed than other surrounding neighborhoods. With the student population expanding each year, studentification creeps into East Athens. Studentification is a form of gentrification with social, cultural, and economic changes that are specifically related to the influx of college students (Pickren, 2012). Broadly, Rashe is attempting to redevelop East Athens for locals to enjoy, not for a constantly overturning student population. Included are plans for apartments, a grocery store, and a community garden. Rashe is encouraging entrepreneurship and improving the community’s access to healthy foods. Our role is to provide Rashe with any data and information she might find useful in this process.
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While I could always read about these issues, my understanding would be insufficient without our class's partnership with Rashe. As a longtime business owner in East Athens, Rashe is an integral part of our work. Throughout the semester, our class has remained in touch with Rashe through Dr. Shannon, including visiting her in East Athens. Listening to Rashe’s perspective and vision for the community was far more informative and inspirational than anything I could read or hear in a classroom. This trip helped me learn more about the context in which studentification and the uneven development of the city occur and more clearly outline the goal of our collaboration. Currently, the class is preparing to interview local individuals, including members of the East Athens community, East Athens representatives, and more, to further our understanding of the neighborhood. Additional interviews will expose us to new perspectives and concerns regarding the East Athens community. This process is one of the ways in which we can stay engaged throughout the project, as well as providing us with a variety of valuable viewpoints.
 
Co-production of knowledge is a concept that applies well to what we are doing in Community GIS but is also a valuable tool in many types of research. As the first half of this semester has flown by, I am learning more and more each week about how to properly engage with community members to conduct ethical and impactful work. I now see an incredibly important side to research that I had previously been overlooking, and I am excited to discover anything else that I might have been ignoring.

Brandon Latimer is an anthropology and geography major, graduating in May 2024. Brandon is working on Urban Studies and GIS certificates and will be getting into the field of global development after graduation.

References
Norström, A. V., Cvitanovic, C., Löf, M. F., West, S., Wyborn, C., Balvanera, P., Bednarek, A. T., Bennett, E. M., Biggs, R., de Bremond, A., Campbell, B. M., Canadell, J. G., Carpenter, S. R., Folke, C., Fulton, E. A., Gaffney, O., Gelcich, S., Jouffray, J.-B., Leach, M., & Le Tissier, M. (2020). Principles for knowledge co-production in sustainability research. Nature Sustainability, 3(3), 182–190. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-019-0448-2
 
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. https://doi.org/10.1353/sgo.2012.0019 
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