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What is Common Ground?

Common Ground is a community-based mapping   and planning project located in Victoria, BC,  that provides mapping and learning resources and opportunities for schools, neighborhoods and  communities wishing to undertake sustainable  community development and planning projects.

What is Community Mapping?

Community mapping is a way for local citizens  to reinhabit their home place. It is a  participatory educational and planning process  which maps the social, economic and ecological  assets, history and development of a given  place. People of all ages share their knowledge,  values and experience with others as a  basis for  visioning and planning. 

 
 Maps are graphic representations that  
 facilitate a spatial understanding of things,  
 concepts, conditions, processes or events in  
 the human world.  
 
Harley and Woodward, The History of Cartography 

GroundWorks Learning Centre  (click here for more info)

GroundWorks Learning Centre is 
run by Common Ground and LifeCycles with 
resource support from Human Resources Development
Canada. Additional support comes from the Capital
Region Food  Roundtable (CR-Fair), OXFAM-Canada and 
CEDCO Victoria. GroundWorks is a public 
library and training-meeting centre with print, 
map, visual and computer resources on: 

• Community and sustainable devlopment 
• Food security 
• Community and neighbourhood-based 
  mapping and planning 
• Schools and community learning and facilitation 
• Agriculture-Food Entreprenurship 
• Community Economic Development 
   

In all of us is some remnant of an ability 
to understand relationships of  
physical space to survival and the  
evolution of stable community life. 

-Doug Aberley 
Boudaries of Home: Mapping for Local Empowerment 

Project coordinator 
Maeve Lydon 

    Why Mapping? 
      Yr 1 and 2         
Schools & Youth Work 
Looking Ahead 

Common Ground Community Mapping Project     

For more information, contact Maeve Lydon at cground@gworks.ca