A new map spotlighting healthy eating markets, community gardens, urban mini-farms and cafes in South Los Angeles was released March 3 during a community bike ride organized by a coalition of community groups and researchers at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
The map demonstrates that healthy eating and living is possible in South LA, with biking and walking routes to gardens and food access. It is available here.
The partners behind the map supporta broad social agenda — from city planning to bicycle and social change advocacy, and they maintain that social change only happens if the maps are integrated into the community’s storytelling network. Integration with the community is a central goal for the research, under the USC Annenberg banner of The Laboratory on the Social Frontier (LOSF), which connects theory and practice in Los Angeles.
Community organizations that joined LOSF members for this ride included T.R.U.S.T. South LA, Community Services Unlimited, as well as the East Side Riders Bike Club and Los Ryderz, two bicycle clubs in South LA that united as United Riders for the ride. All have been long-term partners within the RideSouthLA collective.
More than 70 riders handed out copies of the map as they biked through South LA, touring the neighborhood’s healthy food hot spots in a musical bike parade, and delivering a dozen healthy food baskets to local families. One highlight was the group’s visit to Mama’s Chicken on Slauson Ave at 4th Avenue, where owner Karen Whitman has been selling organic produce grown on CSU’s urban mini-farm for many years. Riders also met with volunteer gardeners from Common Vision who were tending to fruit trees in a school orchard at Normandie Elementary School.
The map was developed after a series of exploratory bicycle rides and walks. To gather text and photos for the map, organizers walked and biked through the neighborhood with South LA community leaders, teenagers and children, as they discovered and documented organic community gardens and healthy places to eat. They uploaded their photos directly from the cameras on their basic cellphones, using the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab platform called ParTour, developed by Professor François Bar and the ParTour researchers.
“We uncovered a seldom told story: there are a lot of places in South Los Angeles where we can get healthy food, and there are safe ways to get there if you don’t have a car. Our map encourages people to look at options that are right there in their neighborhood,” Bar said.
Organizers held a community workshop to sift through the pictures and stories and work with CicLAvia graphic designer Colleen Corcoran to turn the stream of pictures into a custom map.
"My hope is that this map will allow us to bring to light some of the many efforts to address food access in South Los Angeles," said Tafarai Bayne of T.R.U.S.T. South LA. "Both visitors and residents can use the map to find all kinds of local resources, some obvious and some not so. This map helps go beyond what's not working, to reveal positive stories about South Los Angeles."
A second partner organization, Community Services Unlimited (CSU), is primarily focused on food, health and sustainable communities. "This map is an amazing tool for accessing the innovative efforts that have emerged from within South LA to counteract the overwhelmingly bleak reality of our food environment,” said Neelam Sharma, CSU’s executive director.
The coalition designed the project around the core belief that knowledge about neighborhoods is most authentic and powerful when it comes from the community. That research approach identifies community and communication assets, drawing on the Communication Infrastructure Theory of the USC Annenberg Metamorphosis project. High-tech features included iPads mounted to roving bikes to monitor incoming pictures, but the project also supports basic cell phones – anything that can take pictures, Bar said.
This is the second South LA map produced by RideSouthLA partners. Their first mapped a bike ride from Augustus Hawkins Nature Park to the iconic Watts Towers (that map is available on-line here). Moving forward, the RideSouthLA team plans to map other Los Angeles neighborhoods, enlist grassroots organizations and residents to distribute the maps widely, and continue to engage the South LA community to deepen its neighborhood storytelling networks. The maps are available in print and online at http://ridesouthla.com.
The creation of this map was made possible by the Annenberg Innovation Lab and a grant from the University of Southern California Neighborhood Outreach program (http://communities.usc.edu/uno/)
Ride South LA is a coalition of organizations bringing bicycling, mobile mapping and social justice to South LA. Many of our partner organizations are listed below.
T.R.U.S.T. South LA , was established in 2005 as a permanent and democratic steward of land in South Los Angeles that works toward community- focused development. Recently they have partnered with CicLAvia and a number of community stakeholders to bring CicLAvia to South LA and now work towards the expansion of safe biking and pedestrian facilities.
Community Services Unlimited Inc. (CSU), is a 501c3 established in 1977 and headquartered in South Central Los Angeles. Since then it has created community programs and organizing campaigns like the early Safe Seniors to the more recent Free Medical Screening Program and the most recent From the Ground Up. CSU’s mission is to foster the creation of communities actively working to address the inequalities and systemic barriers that make sustainable communities and self-reliant life-styles unattainable.
The Laboratory on the Social Frontier (LOSF) advances scholarly participatory research and applies it in practical strategies that foster civic engagement and enable communities to represent themselves. LOSF brings together communication research and journalism and strengthens links between academics and practitioners. LOSF encourages interdisciplinary collaboration within the Annenberg School, across USC and with the vibrant communities that make up Los Angeles. LOSF is also a vehicle for providing USC students with rich opportunities to engage with those communities.
The Mobile Urban Mapping Project within the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism is a joint effort of two research groups, and is responsible for our ParTour methodology for crowd-sourced mapping and engagement. Our parent research groups include the Metamorphosis Project led by Prof. Sandra Ball-Rokeach, and the Mobile Lab led by professor François Bar. The ParTour project is supported in part by the Annenberg Innovation Lab. For more on the theory behind this work, see our description of situated engagement, or the recently launched MetaConnects.org, which is a translation of Metamorphosis methods into everyday use for community organizations.
See news coverage of the Healthy Food bike ride here:
NBC Los Angeles: “Bike clubs work to drop South LA’s high obesity rate”
KPCC’s OnCentral: Tour healthy food stops in South LA
LAist: “New Food Maps Program Aims to Encourage Healthy Lifestyles in South L.A.”
LA Streetsblog: “Do you know where to find healthy food in South LA?”
