COMMUNITY MAPPING // PARTICIPATORY MAPPING // VERNACULAR MAPPING *************************** Chris Perkins, "Community Mapping" Reviews the state of the art of collaborative community mapping in the UK Significance of local alternative cartographies : parish mapping, green maps, artistic maps, open source mapping, and cycle mapping. History of cartography : maps and power >>> maps have been done by the institutions in power and have been used to administer countries, reinforce property rights, plan military operations, create wars, colonize new worlds, build empires. Usually people have used maps created by professional cartographers. All human beings can map :: People have natural mapping abilities (Blaut 2003) cartography has increasingly been democratized thanks to technology and social change (Rood 2001) emergence of critical approaches to mapping. tools are availble for creating maps and express own mapping skills "Community mapping plays a significan role in this process. It might be defined as local mapping, produced collaboratively, by local people and often incorporating alteranative local knowledge." 127 radical possibilities of community mapping various authors have recognized the possibilities of local community mapping. different kind of struggles that can be advanced with community mapping such as protesting against planners, advancing local claims to land, conserving landscapes, protecting local wildlife in face of development, reasserting indigenous people's rights, re-publishing the past for contemporary consumption, opposing military power, rejecting surveillance, indigenous mapping and reassertion of proprietary rigts counter mapping >>> participatory development using mapping to implement local based development "Democratised mapping offers new possibilities for articulating social, economic, political or aesthetic claims. 127 voice to the margin groups digital mapping and the internet >>> more possibilities :: the world wide web :: characteristics of the computer networks data is available, more accessible and flexible, the web encourages collaborative participation and cost-effective dissemination can be used as an effective medium to organise opposition, activits. GIS: geographical information systems GPS: geospatial technologies participatory GIS>>> incorporation of local voices into maps produced by especialists (usually) evaluation of the state of the art in the UK relations between community mapping, power, and place >> depends of the country and society "community mapping reflects and articulates contested and complex notions of place, mediated through politics, practices, technology, and aesthtetics." 128 bottom up initiatives and democratisation non professional mapping artistic mapping >>> situationists and "psycho-geography" >>> "derive" practice of Guy Debord in paris in 1950s mapping drifts around paris walking and mapping personal tracks >> alternative maps that open view of other places, differents to the ones imposed. walking the city in new ways, reclaiming places from comerce or suveillance hacks and mashups of data with maps Technical developments in recent years have made possible to create alternatives to commodified maps >>> still depend upon commercial provision of base map and image data commercial base maps :: yahoo, google, mapquest "open source alternatives" created to offer a fully sharable data --OSM OSM, founded in July 2004 by Steve Coast CC licence create a "free alternative map" data are collected from diverse sources : pd imagery, donations GPS tracks collected by volunteers with GPS receivers local knowledge is important for street and feature naming out of copyright mapping satelite imagery "The ethic is to oppose any non-public-domain sourcing of matieral that ends up in the database." 135 OSM website "facilitates access to collaboratively collected map data, by employing simple viewing softare, including a newly 'slippy' map." 135 Editing tools allow GPS tracks to be onverted into ways, support the feature coding of the database, and the creation of properly rendered mapping from SVG formatted data. decentralized and strongly collaborative a kind of wiki map shared among those who create it and those who visit the website "Any user can amend any part of the map and the process of map creation explicitly relies upon sharing and participation." This is a kind of "community mapping" "shares a functional focus, rather than a necessary geographical propinquity." 135 "Shared identity is reinforced through mailing lists and a complex array of online tools. A real commmunity of interst is fostered through regular social events, notably 'map parties', which aim to fill in gaps in coverage." 135 partieis bring together novices with more experienced mappers and have become an important part of the open ethos parties around the world wikiprojects with specific local intentions OSM is growing at an exponential rate the map is far from complete Data from OSM can be exported as SVG graphics, be output back to a GPS, and displayed on mobile devices. commercial business are using the OSM data tensions in the project "OSM is run on a shoestring and relies strongly upon a small key group of activits who are essentially interested in developing the open source code and the funtionality of the system. The majority of users simply collect street data: few edit and code. The hardes work is in adding layers of data to the GPS tracks, lavelling the ways and adding value to the street data." 135 As the data becomes richer so there may well be increasing pressure to employ ti in ways that do not confrom to the initial collavoraive remit of the system. "notion of wiki-mapping is strongly technology-dependent" 136 networks :: social possiblities which encourage mapping :: mailing lists, wikis, forum OSM "facilitates local activity that feeds in to a potentionally global project" 136 most community mapping seeks to change the world >> the product is a tool that helps this process OSM will grow to compete with commercial mapping "mapping exercises are usually about an empowering process in their own right: local capacity is developed and social groups grow around a mapping event." 136 importantce of mapping as a set of practices and as an end goa technological and social change >>> collaborative community mapping wil become increasingly significant. people are mapping because they want to do it  ********************** Integrating GIS and Participatory Mapping in Community Development Planning Shalini P. Vajjhala*1 Paper for the ESRI International User Conference, Sustainable Development and Humanitarian Affairs Track, San Diego, CA, July 2005. Geographic information and spatial data have played increasingly important roles in development planning and environmental decision making from top-down management to grass-roots participation. combination of mapping media variety of information and communication technologies (ICTs) for their potential to facilitate participatory development that is both inclusive and environmentally-sensitive. 1 Because decisions related to both development and the environment are inherently grounded in the physical locations of key populations, resources, and issues, spatial information is central to these choices Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and technologies This paper argues that with the changing nature of development, the increasing emphasis on social and environmental sustainability, and the global attention to community-level planning, GIS need to move beyond conventional representations of where people live to describe more effectively the dynamics of how people live. 2 the potential of a GIS to illustrate collectively numerous aspects of a location has been its primary strength; however, with the emphasis on participatory information, this strength of the technology has also become a fundamental weakness of its output. 2 a variety of existing methodologies for facilitating participation have emerged to fill this gap and promote equitable development (Chambers 1994; Cornwall and Jewkes 1995). One such popular tool for spatial data collection is participatory mapping. The term participatory mapping, as it is used here, is defined broadly as any combination of participation-based methods for eliciting and recording spatial data. Specific examples include sketch mapping, scale mapping, and transect walking, among others (Chambers 1994; World Bank 1996). 3 participatory maps, in contrast to GIS, describe how people live, many of these methods are limited in their usefulness. Often the process of data collection is extremely time-consuming, and the resulting information is difficult to compile and unwieldy for effective use by decision makers 3 complementary characteristics of participatory mapping and GIS >> integrate GIS + participatory mapping = participatory digital mapping The combination of participatory methods and GIS is not new, but this research is unique in its collective focus on 1) the participatory inputs into GIS, 2) the direct users of GIS software, and 3) the indirect users of GIS output. The goal of this work is to develop a medium for participation that retains the elaborate information storage and consolidation capacities of GIS while simplifying and tailoring the graphic display to different audiences using elements and attributes of traditional mapping. 3 research combining participatory mapping and GIS is in its early stages. >> participation all of the “building blocks” of participation, including: information collection, integration, and dissemination; stakeholder communication; and participatory decision making.2 3 Collecting participatory information using traditional methods allows the focus of the dialogue to remain on social not spatial issues, while integrating the data into the GIS formalizes the spatial characteristics and maximizes the relevance and potential for integration with other related data. Striking this balance goes back to the differences between how and where people live and brings both types of information together. 6 >>>differences Participatory maps are largely subjective and focused on representing local perceptions and descriptive information. As a result, these maps are often small-scale and widely understood, like a sketch map one would use to give directions based on familiar routes and landmarks. On the other hand, GIS maps are designed to be objective depictions of reality and comprehensive sources of data, hence their visual complexity. 7 strategies for integrating participatory mapping and GIS into participatory digital mapping. bottom-up development planning have increasingly revolved around communities and neighborhoods. Spatial information is essential to understanding these local priorities, perceptions, and preferences and to making socially-acceptable decisions >>>Familiar symbols :: user defined symbols the simple addition of familiar symbols to a GIS map, dramatically transforms the map display and integrates the social accuracy of the original participatory maps with the spatial precision of the underlying GIS layers. 13 >>> integrating sense of place into GIS While traditional GIS maps convey information about a place, they do not provide a “sense of place.” This fundamental “feeling” about a place usually comes from visiting that place, seeing photographs, or hearing stories, and is essential to being able to make decisions or form opinions about a place. This study establishes participatory digital mapping as a medium that connects the sense of place captured by participatory maps with more objective GIS data. 14 There are multiple strategies for collecting participatory maps, integrating the information into GIS, and generating additional maps based on the elicited participatory information. 20 e.g. sketch maps later integrated into GIS >>> relevant for this approach is relevant to a variety of global development efforts including: community-based design and planning, infrastructure and facilities siting, trans-boundary natural resource management, health care service delivery, development-induced displacement and resettlement, environmental justice initiatives, and border and resource conflict resolution, among other worldwide programs. 21 ************************************** uses of maps : for orientation and navigation >> everyday negotiation between the self and the map *********************** Vernacular mappings affect, virtuality, performance PRS Upgrade Report Joe Gerlach Jesus College Supervisors: Professor Sarah Whatmore, Dr Derek McCormack School of Geography, University of Oxford 2009 new forms of participatory mapping, or what is termed here, ‘vernacular mappings’. Arguing that geographers need to pay closer attention to vernacular mappings, particularly to Web 2.0 assemblages social and political potential of vernacular mapping for reconfiguring cartographic practices and geographic imaginations, suggesting that popular forms of participatory cartographies, inspired by prolific virtual geo- visualisations such as Google Earth have the capacity to alter perceptions of, and movements through space. ethnography of OpenStreetMap, a wiki- based participatory mapping organisation, Facilitated to a large extent by the expansion of Web 2.0 (a perceived second generation of the internet which augments user-intervention and cyber-collaboration), participatory and ‘open-source’ mapping groups such as the wiki-based OpenStreetMap have re-ignited people’s enthusiasm for subaltern mappings, whether along pencil or digitalised lines 3 the research demonstrates that vernacular mappings constitute a serious assemblage of performances, processes and humans/non-humans which are set to fundamentally change cartographic practices. These performances, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, constitute a micro-politics; not a politics of resistance, but a quotidian politics; space-times of, and for, the everyday. 4 can vernacular mappings contribute to efforts to develop more participatory cartographies/GIS and which resist subsumption by corporate or state-sponsored mappings? Where vernacular mappings are co-opted into institutional/business practices and knowledge generation, for example in the case of Google Earth, the research will investigate how the performances involved in vernacular mapping are appropriated by cartographic businesses and their attendant modes of (spatial) knowledge production. 5 GIS and corporate cartography mapping which works through bodies as sensors, and one which traces the bodily movements of humans and non-humans. 7 the vernacular as an open-ended set of lively, bodily and co-produced performances 7 >> open source cartographies examples of participatory mapping projects, OpenStreetMap and Greenmap, the review suggests that the hybrid practices and performances of similar organisations highlight the intrinsically vernacular nature and output of these emergent open-source cartographies; explicitly, that whilst their practices rely on particular idioms and literacies, they are based on co-performances and that their outputs (knowledges, materials, waste) are co-produced – with actants not exclusively human. 8 Participatory mapping groups such as OpenStreetMap (OSM) run along and evoke the routines of day-to-day movements. Founded in July 2004, OpenStreetMap defies facile categorisation as an institution, non-governmental organisation or pressure group. At its core is a global collective of amateur mappers who using handheld GPS devices and open-source wiki-style software, map (and generate) spaces. Even labelling OSM as a ‘collective’ is overstating the case, such are its diffuse and networked characteristics. Whilst the mappers are plugged into to a hybrid assemblage of satellites, relay-circuits, fibre-optic cables and concrete, the bodily performances which ‘do’ the sensing are seemingly (and literally) pedestrian; walking, pointing, pressing, sketching, discussing, sometimes over a pint after the day’s mapping has been done. The ‘output’ of OSM is arguably no-less significant than that of cartographic behemoths such as Ordnance Survey and may in time even surpass the relevance of such institutions, but it is the vernacular character and practices of OSM which distinguish it from its corporate counterparts. 9 Participatory mapping and particularly projects which rely on Web 2.0 and other free-open-source software (FOSS) packages enshrine particular idioms and literacie 9 It differs too, from traditional GIS, in that the motivations and methods of OSM are not commercially aligned, although that is not to argue that there are not issues of technical literacy and access which need to be addressed. 10 ***************************************** Good practices in participatory mapping A review prepared for the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) © 2009 by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) What is participatory mapping? Participatory mapping is, in its broadest sense, the creation of maps by local communities – often with the involvement of supporting organizations including governments (at various levels), non-governmental organizations (NGOs), universities and other actors engaged in development and land-related planning. 4 since the 1990s explosion of participatory mapping projects Participatory maps provide a valuable visual representation of what a community perceives as its place and the significant features within it. These include depictions of natural physical features and resources and socio-cultural features known by the community. Participatory mapping is multidisciplinary. What makes it significantly different from traditional cartography and map-making is the process by which the maps are created and the uses to which they are subsequently put. 4 The participatory mapping process can influence the internal dynamics of a community. This process can contribute to building community cohesion, help stimulate community members to engage in land-related decision-making, raise awareness about pressing land-related issues and ultimately contribute to empowering local communities and their members. 4 The general aims and specific objectives of participatory mapping initiatives vary significantly. This variation is directly related to the end-use to which these maps will be put, which in turn is influenced by the audience that will view and make decisions about the content of these maps. 4 Participatory mapping projects can also take on an advocacy role and actively seek recognition for community spaces 4 Often participatory mapping initiatives are initiated by outsider groups and the maps produced will contribute to an outsider’s agenda. 5 Participatory mapping applications Participatory mapping tools: Participatory mapping uses a range of tools including data collection tools that are commonly associated with Participatory Learning and Action (PLA) initiatives. These tools include mental mapping, ground mapping, participatory sketch mapping, transect mapping and participatory 3-dimensional modelling. Recently participatory mapping initiatives have begun to use more technically advanced geographic information technologies including Global Positioning Systems (GPS), aerial photos and remote-sensed images (from satellites), Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and other digital computer-based technologies. 5 Hands-on mapping 13 Participatory mapping using scale maps and images 14 Participatory 3-D models (P3DM) 15 Geographic Information Systems (GIS) 17 Multimedia and Internet-based mapping *************************** Web Mapping 2.0: The Neogeography of the GeoWeb by Muki Haklay1*, Alex Singleton1 and Chris Parker2 map mash-ups, crowdsourcing, mapping application programming interfaces (API), neogeography, geostack, tags, geotechnologies and folksonomies. Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. (O’Reilly 2006) Web 2.0 is a bi-directional collaboration in which users are able to interact with and provide information to central sites, and to see that information collated and made available to others. across the globe, but several important activities have occurred in the UK over the past few years. On this day, the US President, Bill Clinton, announced the removal of selective availability of the GPS signal (Clinton 2000), and by so doing provided an improved accuracy for simple, low-cost GPS receivers. These receivers enabled more people than ever before to collect information about different locations and upload this information to their computers. However, until 2002, when an interchange standard (GPX) was published, the sharing of this information was a complicated task that required computing and data manipulation knowledge. GPX belongs to a class of standards and technologies that provides the infrastructure for what came to be known as Web 2.0. The impacts of Web 2.0 can be considered in terms of the underpinning technologies and the characteristics of application development and use they enable. according to Turner: Neogeography means ‘new geography’ and consists of a set of techniques and tools that fall outside the realm of traditional GIS, Geographic Information Systems. Where historically a professional cartographer might use ArcGIS, talk of Mercator versus Mollweide projections, and resolve land area disputes, a neogeographer uses a mapping API like Google Maps, talks about GPX versus KML, and geotags his photos to make a map of his summer vacation. ‘crowd-sourcing’ ‘in many peer production communities, productive activities are voluntary and non-monetary’; content is created for free, for the development of the community. OSM is a project to create a set of map data that are free to use, editable and licensed under new copyright schemes (Figure6). A key motivation for this project is to enable free access to current geographic information in European countries where geographic infor- mation is considered to be expensive. In the USA, where basic road data are available through the US Census Bureau TIGER/Line programme, the details that are provided are limited (streets and roads only) and do not include green space, landmarks and the like. The OSM data are stored in servers at University College London (UCL) and Bytemark which contributes the bandwidth for this project. p.2027 it is a core group of about 40 volunteers who dedicate their time to create a viable data collection service. This includes the maintenance of the server, writing the core software that handles the transactions with the server in adding and editing geographic information, and creating cartographical outputs. 2028 OSM is a knowledge collective that is creating a meaningful geographic data collection as its main objective. At the same time, it includes a peer production network, as different groups within the organisation are focusing on the development of different aspects of the project – digitising tools, rendering software to display the maps, server software to host and coordinate the production and delivery, and running activities such as mapping parties. It is utilising community computing grids in the process of rendering the various tiles through the programme Tiles@home, in which about 100 volunteers use their computers to render OSM tiles. 2028 the API for downloading the data is very simple – all that is required is latitude and longitude coordinates. 2028 OSM data are not complete or consistent across the world, or even across London, where the project has started. The accuracy of the data is unknown, as there are no systemic and comprehensive quality assurance processes integral to the data collection. 2028 no intention of universal coverage or social equality >>> participatory model of production of content >> provision of info As with other media content providers (e.g. music and news media), the general information provision model has now changed. It has changed from a linear, publishing ‘push’ model where data and information is collected and brought together centrally, turned into product and published to an inter-networked, participatory model where users also collaboratively create, share and mash-up data and where information can be accessed through many channels, almost anywhere, when the user wants it. 2033 The increased prevalence of user-generated content (including products and services) is blurring the difference between producers and consumers in what is sometimes termed prosumer. There is also a realisation of users as innovators, experimenting with new products and services on open innovation platforms, 2033 When all can potentially capture and distribute data through access to GPS, the Internet and mobile devices, what information can users trust? mass collaboration based on the principles of openness, peer production, sharing and acting globally. >>> strong techno-libertarian politics :: high-tech and Internet culture the concepts of collaboration, cooperation, sharing and openness should be seen within a context of a capitalist mode of production where the collaboration is done from personal motives and in advancement of personal wealth, and less as an altruistic activity. 2034 Web Mapping 2.0 and neogeography have added more and made the former easier to use and information easier to access and convey to millions. The potential of these open, collaborative tech- niques to address challenges, be they local or global, is very significant. 2035 large pool of enthusiastic amateurs with significant interest and willingness to invest their time and effort into the use of these technologies. 2035