The engaged geographer: Research in the wider community
Introduction
After 55 years in geography, it might be useful to look back at the why, how, what and where of my public involvement, as a suggestive guide to younger geographers, in and out of academia who may be interested in putting their geographic knowledge and skills to use in the wider community. Although my motivations may usually have been altruistic, there have often been substantial benefits, for example, in the form of recognition, supplementary income, positions for students, and publications. Projects will be divided into three sets: more 'pure' non-reimbursed service activities; often in the local community contractual public sector projects, and court case participation.
Keys to involvement include motivation, appropriate skills and interests, opportunity and, yes, aggressiveness. My personal motivation came naturally from my idealism and radicalism. During graduate work at the University of Washington, I joined the Students for a Democratic Society and the American Friends Service Committee, and began to create a network of friends. The very nature of geography greatly encouraged these efforts for public involvement -- all that information about people and places, developing skills with maps and map communication, the high likelihood of class discussions of local issues (housing, education, transportation, land use, environment, poverty and racism) and its inherent eclecticism and inter-disciplinarity. The development of statistical and modeling skills, including the assessment of proposed private and public proposals was valuable, as was the deliberate pursuit of a broad human geography -- economics, transportation, social, population, political and medical, but tied together by the concept of understanding how people and institutions act in space and create and change places.
Opportunities are legion, from responding to local community needs to working with state, regional or national communities of interest, with citizens who welcome collaboration with academic researchers.
Motivation was not enough. It was necessary to be a little aggressive through participation in interest groups, volunteering to take on research (often simple mapping), and in responding to RFPS (requests for proposals), even at the risk of rejection. Absolutely critical was the building of and maintenance of networks with other people, certainly including political representatives and bureaucrats at all levels, but especially with community leaders and activists.
Non-reimbursed service involvements
These have been frequent, smaller in scope, but were critical to gaining a local reputation, paving the way to larger contractual projects and court cases, described below.
My earliest involvements were as a member of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) and of the AFSC (American Friends Service Committee). For CORE I helped in a campaign to end housing discrimination (see court case below) and helped design a Triad plan to desegregate the Seattle schools (see contractual projects below). The AFSC work involved deinstitutionalization (not an unvarnished success). I volunteered with King County to develop their first comprehensive plan.
I began work with the Census Statistical Area Committee to do work on the 1970 census (driving roads, finding addresses!), chairing the committee since 1976, and did much of the work in revising census geography for the 1980, 1990, 2000 and now the 2010 census. This early involvement was absolutely critical to my appointment to and success with many major projects discussed in the following sections, and to such local committees as the Regional Technical Committee (data, models) for our MPO (Puget Sound Regional Council) and to my position as demographer for the Central Puget Sound Real Estate Research Committee since 1986, producing twice-yearly reports on population and planning.
In the area of political districting, I prepared plans in connection with Seattle, King and Pierce county charter review projects, working with local reformers. Fig. 1 is a map of a system of districts for election of the Seattle City council in support of a citizen effort to elect the council by districts rather than at large (we lost). In the broader area of urban governance, I worked on two major efforts (unsuccessful!) to achieve some form of metropolitan government. In the areas of health and poverty, I helped in a United Way project on the geography of service needs, on a Council of Churches, "Decency Project", and served on the Planning committee for the large Group Health Cooperative. My mapping skills were helpful in working with neighborhood community development efforts.
I enjoyed serving on the State Board for Geographic Names for a decade, but my most exciting and responsible position was on the Washington state Boundary Review Board for King county, a quasi-judicial body dealing with annexation, incorporation and special districts. Recently I served on the review board for King County's huge sewer expansion.
I participated in the Washington state Growth Strategies Commission, which led to the adoption of the Growth Management Act, 1990. Opposition to the geographic tool of the urban growth boundary led to my marginalization from some levels of government. Instead I find myself working with neighborhood councils, often in opposition to the grandiose plans of local government. Of course, this extended to doing a little research for local candidates I supported!
I have been engaged in a number of environmental projects over the years, for example the creation of the North Cascades National Park, several Wilderness Areas, policies on off-road use, and preservation of hot springs, all as a member of community interest groups created for the purpose.
A final part of general public involvement has been the dozens of talks to many governmental and non-governmental groups over the years, usually on some aspect of urban and regional planning.
Consultant type public involvements
After achieving some reputation in urban geography/demography and political geography, I was occasionally invited to participate in studies and analyses for charities, service providers, governments, or public authorities.
The first large project was as Director of the Chicago Regional Hospital Study, 1966-1967, a large scale evaluation of access to and utilization of the hospitals of greater Chicago, leading me and students to a substantial specialization in health services or medical geography, dissertations for students at Washington and Chicago, and certainly, some appreciation for the diverse political interests in the topic.
Back at the University of Washington, I participated in the Puget Sound Transportation Study, a device for local leaders to push for rail rapid transit -- another endlessly controversial topic. My dissertation was in transportation geography, and I came to oppose the proposed rail plan on cost-benefit grounds, triggering almost 40 years ago my lasting disfavor with part of the political establishment. Yes, there is a cost for taking the "wrong" position.
In the 1970s I carried out many small scale studies for a number of school districts and public hospital districts, with respect to future enrollment or patient demand, the need for closing or new schools and the delimitation of director and enrollment districts. Many were unpopular but necessary, such as the Seattle school closure impact study, followed by the even more unpopular and difficult study for the State Superintendent of Public Instruction on consolidation of school districts themselves.
While Associate Director of the Institute for Environmental Studies, I conducted an evaluation for the state of a public future "visioning" exercise called "Alternatives for Washington", the first of several such reviews, and again, one which inescapably made enemies as well as friends. In the 1980s came several more education-related projects, most quite satisfying, but again controversial. Again for the state of Washington, I undertook an assessment of the distribution of "special needs" students (disability, poverty, language, etc). In the late 1980s, after a decade of mandatory bussing for desegregation, I analyzed the demographic impact of such bussing, discovering quite severe costs (2/3 of children born in Seattle left the city schools). I then advised the abandonment of bussing as a failed social experiment, but the district asked instead for a less unpopular revised plan.
Perhaps the most satisfying project of my career was a study (with W. Byers) for the state's university presidents and Higher Education Board on unmet need and the possibility of branch campuses. We demonstrated the need, and the legislature voted to create branch campuses and adopted my plan for two branch campuses for the University of Washington, based on a geographic location analysis algorithm.!
A large and long-running project (10 years) was my appointment as demographer to the Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction project, to assess the health problems from 30 years of radioactive releases from Hanford nuclear site operations. My role was to recreate the locations and characteristics of the populations downwind during the years of significant releases. This was followed by a project on future land uses of the eventually cleaned up site, working with local stakeholders.
The longest running collaborative project for the Office of Rural Health Policy of the Department of Agriculture grew out of a Census Bureau Conference on Metropolitan Areas, and led to the creation of RUCAs, or Rural-Urban Commuting areas, defining commuter sheds at the level of census tracts rather than counties and for all urban places in the United States for 1990. These probed very popular, was repeated for the 2000 census and is now planned for 2010. Fig. 2 is an example of the defined commuting areas for Washington State.
Court cases
Almost as important to my career, and future research direction and society involvements, was my appointment as Special Master for the US Federal District Court to redistrict the congressional and legislative districts for the state of Washington, after the state failed to do so, after the 1970 census. The reason for my selection was the local and regional demographic work I had become known for. The effect of having been chosen was to launch a major component of my subsequent professional career, including additional court cases.
As a result of this successful experience, I was invited to participate in several other court cases and court-ordered redistricting efforts. The most important involved reapportionment following the 1970 census. In Connors vs Johnson, 1971 and Connors vs. Williams, 1972 I spent a considerable time in Jackson, MS to work with the legislature to redistrict congressional and legislative districts to meet Voting Rights Act requirements. In Badham vs Eu, 1984, I worked with Republican plaintiffs to analyze and testify against the extreme Democratic gerrymander (truly masterful) of California congressional and legislative districts, and in Bandemer vs Davis, worked with Democratic plaintiffs to analyze and testify concerning the gross Republican gerrymander in Indiana. Both cases were lost and there has been no progress on political gerrymandering since.
My role in the famous Boldt decision (United States vs Washington which recognized areas with customary rights to salmon fishing in Washington's Puget Sound (and rivers) was minor but satisfying, involving interpreting language and maps from the 1872 Stevens treaty between the US, Washington territory and the Native American Indian nations. There have been a few follow-up cases, actually involving disputes between tribes on details of early treaty landscape descriptions.
Conclusion
Fortunately, geography journals do fairly frequently publish articles which deal with issues of public significance, most commonly reporting on contractual or grant supported research for public entities. For example, just in very recent issues of the Journal of Applied Geography, there appeared papers on GIS and ATV trail planning, public policies for housing needs, and accessibility to heart services in Kentucky. In Professional Geographer we find papers on public involvement in wildlife planning management, and measuring poverty in Los Angeles.
The moral of the story is that the university need not be just an ivory tower, but a rather visible institution to which private and public entities really do look for advice and research. And in a tradition of at least one thousand years, university professors and students have the vital role of critiquing society and its leaders, whether they like it or not. But the world outside also provides a myriad of opportunities for collaborative research in the community. Not all projects turn out as one might wish, but most do provide a sense of public service, at best leading to better public outcomes, and thus an enhanced degree of satisfaction with the role of the university professor.