Lab 3: Neogeography!

West Coast Student Food Coops



Map explanation: I'm the co-founder of the UCLA Student Food Collective, a group that's trying to bring better food to campus and train students to be member-owners of a sustainable community business. It's an exciting project because we are one in what seems to be a growing movement of students who are trying to provide themselves and their campuses with better food, and over the course of the last year I've learned about local student food initiatives all over the country, but especially on the west coast. Some of these, like the Kresge Coop in Santa Cruz, have been operating since the 1970s, but many are recent start-up projects. I thought it would be interesting to not only map these student groups, but the network of resources they reference-- other local coops, farms, eco-centers, etc. What kind of food systems are these groups operating in? What kind of opportunities and resources do they have access to? I included a few goodies (hint: Berkeley has a song for you).

On neogeography: I remember when the fanciest map I knew was the pink and turquoise map of the California coast that my mom would fumble with as we drove up highway five from our small student apartment in LA to my grandparents' home in the Bay Area--and that was because I liked the colors. Now I have high resolution commercial satellite imaging at my fingertips. There are some fair warnings about what digitializing and democratizing all that information could mean: we'll start turning on our GPS instead of remembering where to go (who needs memory when you have a pretty iPhone?), that there will be hundreds of useless, misleading maps! ... and obviously I don't want the federal government making some kind of sweeping policy judgement on information from any old teen geek neogeographer cutting class to map.

But in the context, most of those warnings seem pretty silly. The potential that democratizing information unlocks is always much greater. Take the map above as an example: in relatively little time I made a visual representation of the work I'm doing in the context of my community, my peers, and my region. This map will probably grow, I'll send it to my friends at other coops, and they can add all the resources I missed--and that was just for a weekly lab assignment. On the other hand, if I want to ride my bike over to Santa Monica, I don't have to call Tony, who is probably busy in Tahoe saving the world for Americorps, because there already dozens of maps made by LA bikers on the internet. And I'll still probably bug Tony, but the point is that it's so much easier visualize and place yourself within your community now than it used to be. I think it's far more likely that with every passing year people will have a better understanding of what the world they move through looks like.

View