More CCA Awards & Scholarships
CCA President’s Prize 2023 Winner (College Level) – “Food Deserts in urban Halifax / Dartmouth“
The 2023 college-level or CEGEP award was presented to Hannah Genosko from the Centre of Geographic Sciences (COGS) / Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC) for her map titled “Food Deserts in urban Halifax / Dartmouth”
Design Objectives: This project’s design objectives are to show my research and exploration of food deserts in both urban Halifax/Dartmouth and rural counties in Nova Scotia.
The maps are shown with legend information alongside, and sections of text describing the methodology, findings, connections to poverty, and areas for further research with each map. The data for major chain grocery stores for both maps was independently gathered and georeferenced in ArcGIS Pro.
The Network Analysis tool was used to generate service area polygons showing walking times and driving times for the urban map and rural map, respectively. The maps explore how poverty relates to the food desert phenomenon; I used census dissemination areas showing poverty data to identify low-income neighborhoods and compared them with my walking time results.
For the rural map, I used provincial statistics data that show overall poverty rates by county to compare with occurrence of longer driving distances. Issues came up: the Network Analysis tool generated inaccurate polygons in certain rural driving time cases and are discussed on the poster.
The posters are intended to be shown alongside one another for comparison. These are preliminary findings requiring more research to create a thorough understanding of the large and complex issue of poverty and food deserts, and the variety of mapping tools and techniques available to identify and address it.
