Mapping a path towards equity: reflections on a co-creative community praxis
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Mapping a path towards equity: reflections on a co-creative community praxis Kevin Ehrman-Solberg
. Bonnie Keeler . Kate Derickson . Kirsten Delegard
Accepted: 5 September 2020 Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract ‘Community geography’ is a growing subfield that leverages academic resources to facilitate spatial research in partnership with local communities. The Mapping Prejudice Project and the CREATE Initiative, two interdisciplinary projects at the University of Minnesota, demonstrate some of the opportunities and challenges associated with practicing community geography. Mapping Prejudice is leveraging community crowdsourcing to build the first comprehensive spatial database of racially restrictive housing covenants in the United States. CREATE is co-developing research on critical problems at the intersection of environment and equity through collaboration with community partners. These two projects incorporate a methodological commitment to
K. Ehrman-Solberg (&) K. Delegard Borchert Map Library, 309 19th Ave S s76, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA e-mail: [email protected] K. Delegard e-mail: [email protected] B. Keeler 158 Humphrey School, Science, Technology and Environmental Policy Area, 301 19th Ave S, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA e-mail: [email protected] K. Derickson Geography Room 414 SocSci, 267 19th Ave S, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA e-mail: [email protected]
place-based and historically grounded research that seeks to make knowledge in—and in relation to—a specific place. Incorporating earlier feminist and critical GIS theory, these projects have adopted an iterative research model that places under-resourced communities at the forefront of the research process. Their work produces a fluid, responsive, and cocreative approach that has the capacity to legitimate its knowledge claims through responsiveness to community needs and collective experience. Keywords Community geography Mapping Prejudice CREATE Initiative Racial covenants Green gentrification Crowdsourcing Community engagement
Introduction Since the 1960s, the discipline of Geography has experimented with various forms of communityengaged and scholar-activist work (Bunge 1971; Harvey 1984; Katz 1992). This work began largely in the realm of Marxist and feminist geography. In the 1990s, the emergence of GIS offered a new set of tools for community engaged research. In the ensuing decades, each of these subfields contributed approaches, critical perspectives, and tools that, taken together, amount to a heterodox set of practices that
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can loosely be referred to as ‘‘community geography.’’ In this article, we detail two ongoing research projects at the University of Minnesota that aspire to develop new ways of producing knowledge that learn from the past and establish foundations for more ethical, sustainable and transformative approaches to community engagement. We situate this work in this lineage of community and feminist geography and offer reflections based on our exp
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