Spatiality of Access

While much of my focus at UCLA has been on the direct application of GIS, it has also been important for me to recognize the different ways that GIS can be applied to increase equitability in our social and political lives. GEOG 140: Social Geography is probably the best example of how these issues intersected with my own personal interests.

Social geography is concerned with many things, but most of all it is critical. It looks for people that fall through the cracks, and asks where, and why, this happens. For my final project in this class, I constructed a research proposal for studying the way that people of different abilities navigated the UCLA campus.

While this sort of thing has been studied before, most visibly in the UCLA MetaMap Project, I was unsatisfied with the sort of analysis that had been offered. These projects promised to map out the existing accessibility in individual entrances and walkways, and did so in great and successful detail, with the hope of creating an application that could help people navigate the school. As noble as this task is, to me it seemed foolish to try and create a solution without yet knowing how big the problem actually was.

This is what my proposal tried to address; by engaging with and tracking students directly, we could see what strategies they figured out de facto, not just assume that what was provided de jure was enough for everyone. My proposal of course included the use of GIS, as I revere the use of quantitative data in arriving at specific conclusions, but did so alongside a comprehensive interview process in which the thoughts and conclusions of students themselves would guide our analysis.