About Santa Rosa Mapping Project

The Santa Rosa Neighborhood Heritage Mapping Project is a neighborhood-based community mapping program we are conducting in the city of Santa Rosa, California. The project is designed as a broad-based community engagement program that works with the city’s existing neighborhoods to create an interactive digital map of sites, places and stories important to the people who live there. We will deliver the map as part of the commemoration of the city’s sesquicentennial celebrations in September, 2018. The project was created by Dr. Margaret Purser in the Anthropology Department of Sonoma State University. Faculty and students from the Anthropology, Computer Science, and Geography, Environment and Planning departments have all worked together over the past three years to create the online map. We are working with the Museums of Sonoma County and the Sonoma County History and Genealogy Library to find a permanent, online “home” for the site, which will archive its stories and make them available to the public.

Santa Rosa is a place with many diverse neighborhoods, and each has its own stories to tell. Celebrating the 150th anniversary of the city’s founding gives us an opportunity to document all those stories, and use them to create a single, shared map of this place we all call “home”. Some of those neighborhood stories are about the earliest days of the city’s history. Others are about people, places, and events that make up the city today. Some city neighborhoods are old; some are brand new. This project wants them all. Whether you’ve been here for generations, or just moved in last week, chances are you have a Santa Rosa story to tell about the special places in your neighborhood. This project provides an easily accessible online platform for us to talk about the city places we share, while also documenting the rich and varied “sense of place” across the city’s different neighborhoods.

So what are the most important places in YOUR neighborhood, and what are their stories? What makes your neighborhood special, or distinctive, or feel like home to you? Using the web app for our digital map, tell us a little bit about these places. You can enter individual places, or you can talk about your neighborhood as a whole. You can also enter additional information about a place that someone else has already put on the map.

Questions? Please Contact Us! For questions, comments, or help with the map, email us at srheritagemap@sonic.net . For more information about the Project, to ask about having a Neighborhood Mapping Party in your neighborhood, or to get involved, please contact Dr. Margaret Purser, Project Director, at margaret.purser@sonoma.edu .

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Instructions: what goes on the map?

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