Intro To Oakland Geography

General

1. Read the Wikipedia page on Oakland, focusing on Geography and Demographics

Districts

2. There are many ways to subdivide a city. Some are official, some traditional, some consensual, some local. The districts shown below are one. You should be able to label a map with these district names.

oakland-districts.png

Mills' Immediate Neighbor Neighborhoods

3. Go to this page on the OaklandWiki and read about the neighborhoods that border the Mills campus

Maxwell Park
Frick
Millsmont
Leona Heights
Redwood Heights
Upper Laurel

4. You should be able to locate the neighborhoods around the college on a map:

Learn a little more about a few neighborhoods

5. Go to this page on the OaklandWiki and figure out where your surname would be in the alphabetical list of neighborhoods. Then learn about the neighborhoods that would precede and follow your name in alphabetical order.

6. You should be able to locate them on the map.

Old Oakland

Spend some time with these maps of old Oakland.

5. Using the neighborhood map on the Oakland wiki, the map below and any other resources, identify what neighborhoods were affected by the 1991 Oakland fire.

oakland%20hills%20fire-tunnel%20fire-1.jpg

6. Examine this 1912 map of Oakland at the Oakland library (snapshot below). Try to sketch out what the Mills campus environs and the Laurel district looked like at the time.

oakland-mills-1912.png

7. Now look at these map images from 1936, 195?, and 1967. Describe changes in streetscape around Mills from 1912 to 1936 to 1950s to 1967.

mills-1936.png
mills-1950s.png
mills-1967.png

Topography

8. Consider this small section of a USGS "Topo Quad" map. What can we learn about the topography of the Mills campus and its surroundings? What is different between this map and previous ones of the same area?

oakland-east-quad-3.jpg

Practice

9. How many neighborhood names can you fill in on this map?

neighborhood-map-no-labels.png

See also

http://blog.ouroakland.net/2011/12/oakland-maps.html
Oakland, CA Footage From 1928
http://www.oaklandhistory.com/
Annalee Allen, Edmund Clausen. Oakland