Columbus Community Geography Center

What is Community Geography?

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:

Raise awareness about important community problems and resources;
Inform community and neighborhood planning processes;
Support community organizing; and
Empower communities to make positive change.

Mission

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:

Community and economic development;
Neighborhood revitalization.

Vision

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.

Community Focus

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.

The History of Columbus Community Geography

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.

Past Columbus Community Geography Projects and Activities

2011

Graduate Student: Joyce Wade prepared a white paper for the Mayor’s Neighborhood Stabilization and Improvement Commission surveying community garden management in Columbus and reviewing how community gardens are managed across the United States.
Undergraduate Student: TJ Rice working with Columbus’s newly established Land Bank to identify “leaned property” in the East Highlands neighborhood of Midtown.
Undergraduate students: Phillip Causey and Amanda Ferguson research the history of Midtown communities and elementary schools to create web-publishable materials (images and text) for Midtown Inc.’s “Sense of Place”.
Students help out with Midtown Inc.’s International Walk to School program that supports infrastructure investment for neighborhood schools.
Dr. Anne Knowles (speaker) Rethinking History Using 21st Century Mapping Tools presentation for local, regional and state history practitioners. December 1, 2011. (Speaker).
Lower Chattahoochee Regional Community GIS Workshop Friday October 21, 2011. (Included Atlanta Census GIS specialist workshop on using 2010 census data for local governments).
Faculty: Amanda Rees, appointed to the Mayor’s Neighborhood Stabilization and Improvement Commission.

2010

Dr. Jonnell Robinson “"Points, Lines and People: Plotting a Course for Community Geography". March 17.
Student Research Project: Safe Routes to School and Hannan Elementary School, East Highland, Columbus.
Wynnton: On the Line analysis of the role of economics and race in the creation of Columbus, GA. Student exhibit presented at the Midtown Inc. Midtown celebration, May 2010.

2009

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.

Maps, Posters, and Reports from Columbus Community Geography

Work in progress.

Media Coverage

Anne Knowles

Anne Knowles Fall 2011 Visit

Bibb City Project:

Student Performances Bibb City Project

Bibb City Project News