Teaching with and through Maps

Multiple Maps of NOW: Contemporary Environmental Justice Maps

Maps for this final section of this unit will be selected by students from a collection of GIS tools and datasets such as the EPA’s EJ (Environmental Justice) Screen, the City of Philadelphia’s Office of Sustainability, and multiple grassroots mapping projects. Students will also be introduced to the Map Maker and ArcGis tools mentioned earlier which allows for a base map to be layered with various data.  These tools can be used without an account, but our students do have access to the entire suite of GIS tools on Esri and will have fewer limits on creating robust and detailed map layers than free accounts may have.  Students will self-select groups to decide which intersecting indicators they want to see overlaid on maps of their neighborhood/our city.  There are many existing layers we have curated within our 2892 Philadelphia Esri account, such as food access, tree cover, air quality, school and community gardens, community composting sites, asthma rates, urban heat islands, proximity to green space and proximity to polluting industries, flood vulnerability and more.  Some layers were created by me in partnership with Esri.  Others were compiled by students from the class of 2025.  Still others were created by friends and partners of our program (urban studies professors and grad students, community activist etc.) with whom our students will have opportunities to collaborate directly.  By the time we arrive at this section of the unit I expect students will appreciate the impact of digital GIS tools, and be ready to analyze contemporary conditions. These map investigations will be tools for youth inquiry, civic engagement, and community change. Students will use this penultimate lesson to raise new questions, identify assets and risks in their own neighborhoods, and begin mapping futures that center justice and sustainability.  Whether viewed through the lens of climate change, food justice, or racial equity, the maps they create using ArcGis will allow them to make connections that matter to them, and to analyze information and answer questions that feel relevant.

Their final tasks will be to use all this information to consider what a map of the future might look like and to compile their Atlas for the Future. 

For this capstone section of the unit students will review some public planning data alongside some speculative fiction to dream up features for a future Philadelphia.  We will plan visits to and from city planners from Philadelphia’s Office of Sustainability, which funds some of my program’s environmental justice efforts, and who is in the process of a city-wide community engagement process to update our Philadelphia Climate Action and Resilience Plan.  The existing plan already details many data driven recommendations for future needs for a just and sustainable Philadelphia. The Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVPRC) also has dozens of map-based analyses looking at current conditions overlaid with future environmental predictions.  Between the resources from these civic organizations students will get a taste of who within, and how, cities plan for the future.  Students will read excerpts of plans, review maps of shoreline changes and expected built environment requirements. These will consider how that geography and history continue to influence what is possible. The work of reimagining cities is always unfinished, so this assignment is somewhat open ended and full of student choice.

Figure 9 Imagined Future Philadelphia

Students will also be invited to explore fictional futures. Grist Magazine, which reports primarily on climate change, has a project they call Imagine 2200, a climate fiction initiative, which publishes stories that “invite us to imagine the future we want — futures in which climate solutions flourish and we all thrive.”³⁴ As we move into imagining a future we certainly want to be flourishing and thriving. These short works of eco-futurism, offer glimpses of hopeful, albeit realistic, possible futures -all built with intention on the remains of today.  Students can select any reading from this collection to support their visioning process, but will be guided towards The Hunger and The Hunger, written in the voice of a young former guerilla fighter from Sao Paulo who finds himself as a refugee in a place of plenty, and ends up with a chance to return to finish the work of rebuilding his own hometown.  The author is a geography teacher, who “hopes to live in a world where many worlds fit.”³⁵

Students will be asked to submit a capstone portfolio for this unit, their Atlas for the Future which will be a multi-media compilation of annotated maps from the past, notes, vision boards, collages, plans with marginalia – their choice from several options about contributing to mapping the future.