After two years of preparation, the Community Geography Lab had its grand opening in McGilvrey Hall on Thursday, Feb. 29. What started as a room filled with filing cabinets and old maps, turned into a colorful local resource featuring whiteboard-topped tables and maps lining the walls.
Located on the fourth floor of McGilvrey Hall, in room 410, the Community Geography Lab is open to Kent State University students as well as residents to offer community-driven research. The open house invited faculty, staff, students and community members into the space to explore and see the dramatic transformation.
Community geography is where geographers create strong partnerships between residents and researchers to achieve positive social and environmental change.
The physical space is focused on mapping through collaboration and education while expanding the local learning experiences for students. The moveable whiteboard tabletops allow students and residents to draw out maps and discuss areas for improvement. The room also equipped with large spaces to pin posters and maps, providing a chance for users to view and interact with the maps.
The moveable whiteboard tables encourage collaborative discussion, Lego bricks allow for visual map creation and a lending library full of children’s books and coloring books provides additional resources for aspirational geographers.
The updates to the Community Geography Lab physical space are the first step. The lab will soon be available as a virtual environment as well. The digital space, when completed, will provide accessible mapping resources, open-source software and spatial data resources.
Assistant Professor of Geography Jennifer Mapes, Ph.D., created the lab in hopes of creating a discussion space where students and community members alike can co-produce new knowledge that will be beneficial to the community.
“Community Geography is about working with a community rather than in a community,” Mapes said.
The Community Geography Lab is a Design Innovation Node and a collaboration with the University Library. Design Nodes are a series of makerspaces and resource laboratories located across various Kent State University colleges and campuses.
Michael Hawkins, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Data Library and head of the Map Library, said he hopes that the Community Geography Lab will stress the importance of map-making.
“Map-making is a lot more than just directions in a map, it can be really impactful for a lot of different communities,” he said.
Kent State’s geography program has already worked to create many community map projects. Recently, they collaborated with the city of Kent and Kent City Schools to create maps to help visualize road designs so parents and students can feel safe about students walking to school.
The topographical map “Draining the Swamp: An Environmental History of Wetlands on the Kent Campus” is also housed in the lab.
Jennifer Mapes previously worked with her students to create a 3D sustainable city made from Lego bricks, which is housed inside the Community Geography Lab today. She hopes to continue to create visual maps, as well as use the lab as a friendly place to gather and study.
“I’m actually excited to see the ideas that everyone comes up with. I think that this space can double, triple and quadruple as a lot of things,” Mapes said.