Current Geography Projects
- Food: An Atlas
FOOD: There is nothing so simple nor anything so complicated. Food is the neighborhood blackberry bramble foraged in midsummer. Food is the rice grain that finds its way to the table from halfway around the world. The agricultural food base has become the first link in a chain of industries that deliver the fuel needed to energize the human body and mind. From it a vast complex of interrelated businesses—the global food industry—is focused on the production, distribution, preparation, and consumption of comestibles. There is almost no segment of the economy untouched by this network. And there is certainly no human unaffected by it. Despite the industrialization of food, it remains a personal and intimate human endeavor. We find community and identity in the food we eat. James Beard, American chef and early food writer, stated the profoundly obvious, “Food is our common ground, a universal experience.”
An Atlas is a collection of maps with a common purpose—either to present a holistic picture of place through repeating geography that maps various phenomena of the atlas’s subject area, or to examine a theme across a broad geography, striving to edify the reader on a particular subject. Food: An Atlas is of the latter. It illuminates a theme by its examination of food phenomena over a wide range of geographical scales, locations, and research disciplines. Free download of the atlas here...
- Mission Possible: A Neighborhood Atlas
- Mission Possible: A Neighborhood Atlas is the product of a collaboration with Mission Loc@l and a project in experiential learning by students in the Cartography and GIS Education (CAGE) Lab at UC Berkeley’s Geography Department. Students examined and mapped phenomena of the Mission in an effort to look at the neighborhood from different viewpoints and to offer users useful information. The maps in this atlas are products of students’ work and imagination. Mission Possible employs a cartographic style that is a hybrid of traditional cartography, poster art, infographic, and map as narrative. The map is conceived as a narrative of place, using data visualization techniques, cartographic symbology, and graphic art and design concepts to tell different stories.
- The Living New Deal Project
- The Living New Deal Project is an unprecedented effort to inventory and interpret the impact of New Deal public works projects around the United States. We invite informants to contribute information and photographs to help us map the vast matrix of public buildings, parks, and infrastructure we have come to take for granted. Through this archaeological dig into America's lost history, we are revealing an indispensable but all-too-often invisible landscape of public service, economic development and civic beauty.
- Urban Food
- Cultivating the Commons: Assessing the Potential for Urban Agriculture on Oakland's Public Land
Here in Alameda County, California, almost one-third of the population is food insecure. An even larger number live in areas with limited access to affordable and nutritious food. Many residents of Oakland’s flatlands neighborhoods have few healthy, culturally-appropriate, or affordable food choices. Their food choices are further constrained by other factors such as purchasing power and access to transportation.
- California Studies Association
- The California Studies Association (CSA) is an independent organization, dedicated to the exchange of ideas about California, the promotion of an integrated understanding of California as a region, and to creating a public discourse on the future of this richly textured state.
- San Francisco Bay Estuary: A key to identifying the seeds of wetland species
- Assists researchers in examining climate and wetland changes in the last 10,000 years through identification of seeds found in sediment cores or samples, thus allowing them to date the occurrence of the particular species.
- Plant Communities of California
- A chart of plant communities in California with detailed information on vegetation type, distribution, elevation, growing season, edaphic properties, adaptations, diversity and cover.
- Niger Delta Economies of Violence Project
- A program of research and training addressing questions of why oil-producing communities in the Niger Delta suffer intense conflict and what can be done about it.
- Key to Wetland Pollen
- This pollen key is a collection of pollen images and taxonomic information for plants of the San Francisco Bay Region, with an emphasis is on tidal wetland species.
- Aztec Place Name Glyphs Project
- An online version of Don Antonio Peñafiel's 1885 book Nombres Geográficos de México, which is an annotated listing of all the place name glyphs included in the Matricula de Tributos and the Codex Mendocino. The book includes an Atlas with 39 colored plates and a total of 462 glyphs.
- Gender Bibliography
- A bibliography of geography and gender, compiled by Kate Davis.
- Environmental History of North America Bibliography
- A bibliography for the study of the Environmental History of North America, compiled by Jessica Teisch.
- Maya Atlas Website
- A site describing the Maya Atlas, a project of the Mayan People of Southern Belize that uses community mapping in the struggle to preserve Maya Land in Southern Belize.