CKI Seminar – Community Mapping: Creating Common Ground Locally and Globally – Maeve Lydon, University of Victoria, Canada

CKI Seminar – Community Mapping: Creating Common Ground

Locally and Globally

Maeve Lydon, University of Victoria, Canada

Date: Thursday 19^th September 2013

Time: 12.30 ‰ÛÒ 2.30pm (Tea/Coffee available from 12.15pm)

Venue: Moore Institute Seminar Room, NUI Galway

The seminar is free but it is necessary to book your place on or before Tuesday 17^th September, with Ann Lyons

Event Details

Community‰ÛÒbased mapping is an educational, planning and research tool for participatory and sustainable community development. It enables people to mobilise assets, capture the power of place, visualise engagement and re-present scenarios for change. Maeve Lydon, the presenter from the University of Victoria, Canada, will share the story of the work of the Community Mapping Collaboratory and the Common Ground Community Mapping Network in Canada (www.mapping.uvic.ca).

The presentation will include how the Community Mapping Collaboratory (CMC) integrates community mapping into research, student curriculum/ field work and community projects, while building strong planning and development partnerships with local governments, neighbourhoods, funders, and the community and voluntary sector. Specific projects include sustainability, neighbourhood and city planning, child, youth and citizen engagement, arts and culture strategies, food security inventories, and the development of sustainable local economy. How the CMC uses high tech- high touch applications and open-source, GIS and CIS (geographic and community information systems) will also be included, with discussion of tools and techniques which community and campus groups can easily use. Finally, Maeve will share global connections in her role as advisor and Canadian hub/resource for the Green Map System (www.greenmap.org), based in New York, who have supported more than 750 print and on-line green mapping initiatives around the world, with many in Ireland, the UK and other parts of Europe.

Maeve Lydon (whose parents were born and raised in Galway and father graduated from UCG!) is the Associate Director of the Institute for Studies and Innovation in Community-University Engagement (CUE) and staff with Community Based Research Canada (CBRC), based at the University of Victoria on the west coast of Canada. She has a background in community and international development, education and social change. Maeve is the Project and Partnership Coordinator with the Community Mapping Collaboratory, which was recently awarded a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC) Partnerships Development Grant to deepen research and networking related to community mapping locally, nationally and globally. Her MA Thesis was entitled (Re)Presenting the Living Landscape: Community Mapping as a Tool for Transformative Learning and Planning – Abstract and access to full document available here.

The Community Knowledge Initiative (CKI) fosters community university partnerships that aim to promote the principles and practices of civic engagement and democracy.