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| navigate: home: magazine: spring/summer 2000: article | |
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Award-winning professor addresses Urban poverty By Celena E. Kusch | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Not surprisingly, maps line the walls to Dr. Lakshman “Lucky” Yapa’s office in the Department of Geography at Penn State. As he sits down to describe his current work, he draws out more maps and photos to illustrate his projects. One map of metropolitan Philadelphia charts the commuter destinations of the workers of an entire West Philadelphia neighborhood. The destinations are scattered over an eight-county area. As Yapa explains, behind each destination are hours of time in commuting and child care and thousands of dollars in automobile maintenance, insurance, parking and other transportation costs. More than simply a guide to where people work and learn, the map charts the flow of resources—in time and money—out of the community, one of the lowest-income neighborhoods in Philadelphia. Other maps in his collection mark the location and concentration of everything from schools, grocery stores and public murals to fast food restaurants and the brownfields of industrial waste. The photos and stories Yapa provides to accompany the charts tell a story similar to that of commuter transportation. They recount stories of how scarcity is created: fast food taking the place of more nutritious, less expensive food; money lost from lack of attention to energy conservation; and a general perception that “successful” people do not remain in this area. This, Yapa explains, is his work: to reinvent urban geography through the details of the local communities and to use a new view of scarcity to solve material problems. By rethinking existing resources in knowledge, materials and infrastructure, Yapa hopes future maps will show improved nutrition, education and housing for local communities. “Geography is concerned with a sense of place,” Yapa says. “Solutions have to be very place specific. Answers to poverty cannot be found in large metanarratives about the economy or global interdependence, but must be sought in the everyday details of life in the city.” Based in these community-centered theories, his entire career as an academic has been devoted to connecting his expertise to the real social problems people face around the world. In recognition of his commitment and accomplishments in university outreach, this spring Yapa was honored with the Penn State Award for Faculty Outreach. Dr. Sara Parks, associate dean for outreach, Cooperative Extension and international programs in the College of Health and Human Development and chair of the selection committee for the Faculty Outreach Award, said, “Lakshman’s work serves as a wonderful model for the integration of outreach teaching, outreach research and outreach service. He challenges us all to continue to find new ways to engage our scholarship with community needs.” Yapa’s outreach scholarship has two components—work abroad and work in the Philadelphia area. Addressing a variety of needs in countries throughout the world, Yapa has served as a teacher and curriculum designer for senior government personnel in the use of geographic information systems (GIS) for regional planning. As part of an international effort, he coordinated the use of GIS and computer mapping in designing a malaria control strategy in Eritrea and provided training for Ministry of Health personnel. In addition, he has developed low-cost computer mapping systems for use in regional planning in Egypt, Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka and the Philippines. According to Dr. Roger Downs, department head and professor of geography, Yapa’s work has made an important impact on a global scale: “I would simply say that Lucky Yapa made a major contribution to regional development programs in a number of Third World countries. He brought his skills in geographical analysis and GIS to bear on problems in those countries and tailored solutions to fit specific contexts.” But, Downs emphasized, Yapa also extended his work by connecting that outreach research and service back to the Penn State classroom and community. “From our perspective, the value was his ability to bring these experiences back into the classroom and to share them with students—and often to inspire students to share his vision of service,” Downs added. In fact, work with students on the University Park campus is the cornerstone of his second major outreach initiative. Integrating his own research and that of undergraduate honors students, Yapa leads a student service-learning project in Philadelphia designed to produce a new social theory of urban poverty. Rethinking Urban Poverty: The Philadelphia Field Project (PFP), Yapa’s service-learning project, has operated through The Schreyer Honors College since the summer of 1998. In the program, a select group of undergraduates from a variety of disciplines undertake research-based thesis projects designed to advance understanding of specific aspects of urban life. The students complete course work in the spring semester and spend a month living, working and conducting research in a West Philadelphia neighborhood. The program demonstrates a well-integrated outreach effort in which Yapa teaches students to produce research that is responsive to community needs and can provide service within the scholarship itself. Dr. Andrew Carleton, professor of geography, summarized the project, saying, “In essence, students spend considerable time ‘in the field’ living and working in a low-income neighborhood in West Philadelphia. The goal of this experience is for the students to identify the links between poverty and community development and, through their research, to become a resource for the community.” As Yapa explains, “It brings students to the community, it allows students to learn from the community, and it enables students to return something to that community. Once we have a critical mass of knowledge, we will share it more openly and ask sociologists, city planners and community leaders to examine what we produce.” Downs commented on the importance of such outreach, saying, “The Philadelphia Field Project brings together the best of university life—research and education and service to the community. It links University Park to Philadelphia in a long-term cooperative relationship. It offers Penn State students an opportunity to bring their research skills to bear on real-world problems. PFP is a model for action-oriented service learning.” In order for such a project to work, Yapa emphasizes, the students need to challenge the foundations of current methods of urban problem-solving. Through the PFP, Yapa has been able to teach groups of students to think beyond conventional theories to find solutions that produce measurable results. According to Yapa, social and economic solutions of the past have turned to science, technology and economic development to eliminate poverty, often to opposite effect. Yapa sees this problem as one of definition and ‘discourse.’ As government and university experts define poverty primarily as an economic problem, they overlook or marginalize a hundred other noneconomic ways to address problems of the poor. In such theories, Yapa explains, low-income areas are by definition needy and lacking in resources as compared to the suburbs, which are designated as the norm. The conventional solution: add more resources to low-income areas and develop them to meet the standards of the wealthy suburb. Yapa says that solution is flawed. “If one-fourth of people live in the suburbs, three-fourths cannot,” he notes. “The sheer quantity of resources needed per family to sustain a suburban lifestyle automatically disallows a majority of people from also adopting it. We must begin to see that suburban life is not the only model of good living if we are to have the power to solve the problem of scarcity.” Instead, Yapa advocates redefining scarcity by identifying nontraditional resources in low-income areas and asking questions that look beyond income-based designations of rich and poor. “Consider the average income in this neighborhood, a sum of $15,000. Can we change what $15,000 means in our neighborhood?” Yapa asks. “For example, adequate nutritious food is made expensive in this neighborhood, while all the messages and images about nutrition point to fast food. We need to create knowledge about good food. This leads to questions I would pose to the University: Could you produce a literature of urban nutrition? Could you create food co-ops? How can we make it ‘cool’ for young people to have urban gardens? We need to deconstruct and reconstruct the way we think about food to fit the needs of this community. When you start thinking about solutions in this way, the answers are everywhere.” That is exactly what Philadelphia Field Project students are doing. Through the course, students learn to use geographical information systems, a technology designed to handle the detailed complexities of geography. They then collect data and apply their theoretical knowledge to solving community problems of scarcity. Past thesis projects have examined home ownership, neighborhood nutrition programs, elementary education, child care, clothing consumption, transportation, health care and more. Yapa has high hopes for the future of this kind of work in redefining the concept of poverty. “It’s not enough to take bright young students and ask them to enter an urban neighborhood to analyze the problems,” he explains. “We also need to learn about the richness of the resources of urban neighborhoods—the energy efficient row housing, the ease of creating neighborhood watches in such housing—and we need to send bright young students into the suburbs to examine problems created by wasted resources in lawns, excessive energy usage and inefficient transportation patterns.” Yapa’s students themselves speak of the power of such research. Autumn Hannah and Pikai Oh, Schreyer Honors Scholars who studied urban gardens in Philadelphia’s Mantua community, explained, “By challenging the idea of ‘success’ and accepted ideas of community well-being, we saw the strength, the beauty and the potential of Mantua. When Mantua is seen from a different perspective, resources abound; it becomes a place that is different from the suburbs, but by no means inferior. By describing the potential of urban gardens, we would like to explore Mantua through a noneconomic logic and define this neighborhood not by what it lacks, but by what it has to offer.” Part of that perspective also comes from the volunteer component of the project. While they study and research the area, students also fulfill volunteer requirements that bring them closer to the community. Yapa believes the volunteer work prevents the project from becoming a strictly “cerebral exercise.” Students have helped to establish a Children’s Garden for the Sarah Allen Home, a women’s shelter run by the Friends Rehabilitation Program (a Quaker organization) and have donated time to after-school programs for neighborhood children and to a new neighborhood computer resources room established by the Department of Geography. “So much of their time, the students are analyzing and deconstructing poverty,” Yapa explains. “By working with the shelter, they are also able to respond to the immediate needs of the community. “A student told me a story of a neighborhood child’s joy at his discovery of urban entomology,” he adds. “Neighbors and students were busy volunteering at the Sarah Allen Home Children’s Garden. One 10-year-old boy, a reluctant volunteer, stayed around all morning only because his father insisted, until he discovered an earthworm for the first time. Now the animated child was full of questions. His curiosity satisfied by student and neighborhood volunteers, the boy was transformed. He was engaged, more willing to help out. It was his earthworm in his garden.” In response to the boy’s enthusiasm, one Penn State student produced a guide to urban entomology for use in future Children’s Garden programs. “Students find that kind of experience very concrete and immediate,” Yapa notes. “Through volunteer work, they build valuable relationships while they work on the thesis.” The manner in which the experience transforms our own undergraduates, according to Yapa, is the greatest success of the Philadelphia Field Project. He turns to an excerpt from Elliot Westerman’s report on street murals to illustrate that change: “From this experience, I learned to go beyond economics and came to appreciate the role of culture in the building of a strong community. I was able to overcome the burden of cultural stereotypes and see the destructiveness of seeing African Americans of the inner city as the ‘problem other.’ Through my close contact with the community, I sensed the power of hope, faith and immense love that does exist. ... [T]his was an area of families, of loving parents and trusting children, of kind people with hope and faith. Understanding this was the most important thing of the summer of the Field Project.” Clearly pleased with his students, Yapa adds, “You can’t teach that kind of change. The students develop a remarkable insight. For me so far, success is in seeing the change in the lives of the students.” Downs credits Yapa for nourishing that insight. “He lives with the students in Philadelphia: he is there to guide, to advise, to encourage them. He makes contacts with service agencies throughout the city. He provides the intellectual stimulus behind the program. A simple measure of its success is the over-enrollment in the program,” Downs commented. For students, personal development has been matched by academic accomplishment. Thus far, the project has produced 18 student thesis projects, a poster session at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers and an upcoming publication of edited student papers in the Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society. Another measure of the project’s impact is in the productive relationship Yapa’s program maintains with the neighborhood, especially with Deborah Thompson-Taylor, the manager of the Sarah Allen Home. These connections have provided a “window into how best to work with the community,” Yapa said. As a result of community input, Yapa has been instrumental in the creation of a Philadelphia Forum, which brings invited speakers to the region to address urban issues and challenges and a career development program for neighborhood women conducted by assistant professor of geography Lorraine Dowler. According to Diane Gentry, program administrator for the Friends Rehabilitation Program, the Children’s Garden that Penn State students helped establish “functions as an important part of the summer environmental programs that we run. It brings into an otherwise completely urban area a connection to where food comes from, how plants grow and the outdoors. This little garden has been very successful at fostering a sense of stewardship and pride as these children, over the course of a few months, plant and harvest vegetables and plants.” With such signs of success, it is no surprise that Yapa is receiving calls from other universities interested in reproducing the program. “This model is so exciting that The Schreyer Honors College is seeking funds to replicate it in at least two other parts of the state, the Erie area and probably a rural site in Southwestern Pennsylvania,” added Dr. Cheryl Achterberg, dean of The Schreyer Honors College. “It has also inspired us to create an expectation for each new freshman coming into The Schreyer Honors College to dedicate 15 hours of service each semester that they are at Penn State. In other words, Lucky’s work has inspired many, many other students, staff and faculty to become more engaged with the community, dedicating not only their time, but also their expertise to the resolution of real issues in the community.” The Philadelphia Field Project is supported by The Schreyer Honors College, the Schreyer Institute for Innovation in Learning, the Children, Youth and Families Consortium, the Office of Undergraduate Education and the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences. Additional institutional support has also come from the American Friends Service Committee, the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Authority and Penn State Cooperative Extension. Plans are under way to partner with Penn State Abington for the 2000 summer session. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Schreyer Honors College Scholars in Dr. Lakshman Yapa’s service-learning project Rethinking Urban Poverty: The Philadelphia Field Project have produced a wide range of research theses. Projects conducted in 1998 and 1999 include:
As part of her honors thesis on “Writing Poetry as a Learning Tool,” Christy Hermann, a Schreyer Honors Scholar in the College of Education, participated in the Penn State Philadelphia Field Project. She worked with children on poetry writing. Here are some of the children’s poems:
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