HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: APPROACHES TO COMMUNITY MAPPING

One of the first examples of community mapping was done in the 1890s by settlement house pioneers, such as Jane Addams at Hull House in Chicago, who did a sociological survey of the neighborhood and published Hull House Maps and Papers.

This process developed over time to include community mapping done by young people in the 1930s with support from a community-minded principal named Leonard Covello at Benjamin Franklin Community High School in East Harlem. As part of the curriculum students at Benjamin Franklin Community High School surveyed their neighborhood to find out what was there and then created giant maps to put in the school which gave information such as how many community organizations, public playgrounds, and churches existed and where they were located, but also identified things like liquor stores and bars. Covello writes:

The map showed that in East Harlem there were forty-one churches and missions, twenty-two political clubs, nine labor organizations, five hundred and six candy stores, two hundred sixty-two barber shops. There were twenty-eight liquor stories, one hundred fifty six bars, twenty-six junk shops, six hundred eight-five grocers, three hundred seventy-eight restaurants, two hundred thirty-two tailors, and sixty-three radio repair shops, as well as two hundred ninety-seven doctors, seventy-four dentists, one hundred and two furniture stores, and fourteen loan offices. Hungrily our map devoured these statistics.….It was both significant and depressing, both to students and us teachers, to realize that a community which could support forty-one religious institutions and twenty-two political clubs could boast only a few open playgrounds for its children, three public halls, [and] no neighborhood newspaper at all.

More recently, John McKnight and John Kretzmann of the Asset Based Community Development Institute at Northwestern University (http://www.northwestern.edu/ipr/abcd.html) have developed a process of using “asset mapping.” McKnight and Kretzmann have attempted to change the way professionals look at communities. Instead of seeing communities as a glass that is half empty- i.e. looking at all the problems in a community (drugs, crime, abandoned housing, etc), they argue that professionals should look at the glass as half full and map the assets in a community (schools, community centers, green space, etc.).

Finally, Harry Boyte and the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the University of Minnesota (www.publicwork.org) helps young people to “power map;” to create a better understanding of the self-interests of stakeholders when trying to implement change on public or community issues they care about. In their youth initiative, Public Achievement (www.publicachievement.org), young people use mapping as a tool for stakeholder and power analysis, as well as relationship building to develop allies and strategies for “public work” projects.