All human activity takes place on a geographic stage of great diversity and constant transformation. For more than a century, the Geography Department at Berkeley has been a leading center of scholarship about earth's landscapes and human relationships to the environment. Our inquiries encompass a wide range of topics, from the economies of cities and cultures of built landscapes, to tropical climates and the flow of polar ice sheets. We combine rigorous empirical work with deeply conceptual theoretical analyses, always recognizing the importance of both spatial processes and accumulated histories. We use geographic analyses to illuminate the abiding problems of the modern world.
Featured Project - Mission Possible: A Neighborhood Atlas
Mission Possible: A Neighborhood Atlas is the product of a collaboration with Mission Loc@l and a project in experiential learning by students in the Cartography and GIS Education (CAGE) Lab at UC Berkeley’s Geography Department. Students examined and mapped phenomena of the Mission in an effort to look at the neighborhood from different viewpoints and to offer users useful information. The maps in this atlas are products of students’ work and imagination. Mission Possible employs a cartographic style that is a hybrid of traditional cartography, poster art, infographic, and map as narrative. The map is conceived as a narrative of place, using data visualization techniques, cartographic symbology, and graphic art and design concepts to tell different stories. Interested students were invited to create maps based on a theme they found compelling or simply worthy of investigation.
On orientation: The direction at the top of a map is its orientation. It is a common, generally strictly observed, convention to orient maps to north or nearly north. This has served to reinforce northern hemisphere centrism, placing north “up” in a superior or dominant position. But north is not up... More...
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