Blog #5: How Place Matters
I believe that place matters greatly, for your environment shapes you into the person you are. The place that you grew up in molds you into who you are, with factors like: race, average income, living arrangements, and local stores. These examples have helped me think about the importance of “place” because they have made me realize all the different parts that makeup a specific place and how each place influences a person in a unique way. I think growing up in my neighborhood taught me how to get along and respect other cultures, for my neighborhood was mostly Hispanic. My neighborhood defiantly impacted me in a positive way, it gave me a deeper understanding of other cultures/races and other economical classes. I think there are definite differences from my neighborhood than my peers in both the community SURF and CI students. My community/ neighborhood was very small and tight-knit, where as other people grew up in really big/ well-known cities. The difference between my city and theirs is that you would go to a high school football game and everyone knew each other, the grandparents and parents and students. Our city was inhabited by generations and everyone stayed there or came back after they grew up. So I feel that “place” influences people in the way that they look at others, where they want to live in the future, and aspires them to obtain certain goals.
In both of my articles, they explain that things like socioeconomic and demographic factors go into creating each “place”. Each place is very significant and also labeled by people who conduct GIS. They found that lower-income communities had poorer quality in healthcare, which is very unfair, for everyone should have the same quality healthcare no matter their economic status. The articles use both Geographical Information Systems and Spatial data. For they look at things such as: age, sex, ethnicity, income, social class, education, and language ability to determine the geographical factors that go into healthcare. They use Spatial data of socioeconomic disadvantages, sociocultural barriers, and high healthcare needs to identify the areas that do not have accessibility to high-quality healthcare.
Due to GIS I am able to grasp a better understanding of how “place” affects issues that are very important and heavily studied in my field. Using GIS, you are able to identify the issue of cities in more poverty than other receive a lower-grade of healthcare. It is important that you are able to see this while using the system because economic status should not have influence on such things as the quality of healthcare. “Place” allows you to pinpoint problems within a geographical sense so that it is easier to recognize them and categorize them into places that have similar issues.
I saw many links between the Geographical Information Systems used in my articles and the material we have already covered in class. In class we went over that communities that have an average lower income tend to have more fast-food restaurants, smoke shops, and liquor stores. I see the link that most lower-income families cannot afford to go to the grocery store and cook healthy meals, so they take the cheap alternative of fast-food. GIS could be used to prove that more healthcare is needed in communities of poverty, for they have more health issues due to the food they eat and their environment.
