Curtis Roseman shows students around town

Mapping Community Coordinates

By Nicole St.Pierre

Curtis Roseman knows the neighborhood. Since 1993, this USC College geography professor has been conducting analyses and making detailed maps of USC and its surrounding environs.

As a result, Roseman has become an invaluable resource to USC’s Center for Civic and Community Relations (CCR), where he is a member of the research and information committee headed by CCR Director Kay Song. For more than 10 years, Roseman has helped the CCR with maps, charts and graphs to organize a number of community-outreach projects—such as the Kids Watch Program, where neighborhood residents sit outside to ensure students get home from school safely.

“These maps have a great variety of uses. In many ways they have contributed to a reawakening of interest in Los Angeles’ neighborhoods,” says Roseman, who works with graduate and undergraduate students to create the print and electronic map series.

The information helps shed light on a number of close-by resources, including some historical properties many people did not know existed until the maps were published. “The two-mile radius around the University Park Campus houses the largest concentration of historical structures in the City of Los Angeles,” says Roseman. “In those same streets are dozens of religious institutions, including a Buddhist temple, a mosque, two Mormon facilities and a great variety of Christian churches. The area is quite remarkable.”

Using census data from as far back as 1980, Roseman’s work portrays useful information about the USC neighborhood, such as population characteristics, ethnicities and age, which have proven valuable to USC staff, faculty, parents and students. Currently, he is helping with a series of maps that detail the area around the Health Sciences Campus.