For information on the Columbus Community Geography Center, please contact
Phone: 706-507-8378
Working with local non-profit agencies, community organizations, and local government bodies, the Columbus Community Geography Center involves faculty and students in research projects that:
Located in the Department of History and Geography at Columbus State University, Columbus Community Geography is a community-driven collaboration that uses geographical thinking to research, map, analyze, and provide fresh and insightful perspectives on issues in the Columbus region. Columbus Community Geography is committed to addressing community challenges that relate broadly to the themes such as:
Columbus Community Geography helps create communities – from neighborhoods to regions – that are empowered to use maps, spatial analyses and other geographical and historical data to better understand their landscape and to build a just society.
Columbus Community Geography provides services to, and serves as a resource for, community and neighborhood groups, NGOS, faith-based agencies, and community coalitions that would like to use GIS mapping and other geographical techniques (such as place-making) to address community concerns.
After the Bibb Mill fire in 2009, CSU faculty and students came together to consider the history of the Bibb City community and contemplate its future after loosing the massive historic mill structure. An interdisciplinary group of geography, history and theatre students developed interpretive materials to aid the community’s planned Historic District status and to support a reinterpretation of the community.
In 2010, CSU’s College of Letters and Sciences Strategic Plan, geography features prominently. The college identifying geography as important in developing the intellectual capital of the college by requiring a GIS lab established on the RiverPark campus, requiring the general expansion of undergraduate research opportunities, and a call to develop social capital by strengthening social capital by strengthening partnerships through at GIS Center with local and regional government.
The university’s call to strengthen partnerships with the community inspired the creation of Columbus Community Geography. The CCG is modeled in part on the Syracuse Community Geography (SCG) program. SCG director Jonelle Robinson came to speak at CSU about her experience (2010). The Columbus Community Geography Center seeks to connect cultural geography, urban geography, and GIS students to community-based projects with local and regional government and local NGOs through service learning projects.
Bibb City: Collected Lives from a Mill Town
This project developed interpretive materials on Bibb City, a former company-owned mill village in west central Georgia as part of a multi-disciplinary project that included 40 students in four concurrent classes during Maymester, 2009. The project was directed by Dr. Becky Becker (Department of Theater) and Dr. Amanda Rees (Department of History) at Columbus State University. The web site includes: an oral history play, text and images from the history exhibit, "in character" walking tour scripts, a printable self-guided community tour and a downloadable audio tour. Student exhibit in Bibb city and at CSU spring-fall 2009.
Work in progress.
Anne Knowles
Bibb City Project:
©2010 Columbus State University
Last Updated: 8/21/12
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