Tag Archives: ebola

Pioneering Community Open Mapping in the UK

Wellbeing, Resilience, and Food-Desert-mapping. With Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, NHS Wales and Missing Maps/Medecins Sans Frontieres.

Community-Devised Resilience and Wellbeing Map – Social Assets in Gurnos and Galon Uchaf, Merthyr Tydfil

Community-led data helped to map wider determinants of Wellbeing, Co-morbidities, Social Exclusion and outbreak vulnerability. Reconnecting the NHS with its communities in the birth-place of the NHS (and of the Labour Party).

We adapted Motorcycle Mapping methods previously used with Medecins Sans Frontieres, Red Cross, UN, African Health Ministries and INGOs to use for mapping social inclusion, outbreak resilience, climate justice and lived Wellbeing experiences. Based out of Twyn Community Hub, Mel, Michael and Amanda were our community Disaster Risk Reduction mappers. Walking miles of Merthyr, they interviewed for perceptions of need, food and social access, and community assets. They then surveyed infrastructural provision realities site-by site. The reports created cultural, resource-access map layers, profiling a rich social capital, a proud pre-industrial heritage, (including ancient mythologies/holy sites), and the qualitative relations between perception and reality in the community voice. All available in the public domain, these anonymous data are your pocket, on all phone apps using OpenStreetMap/Mapbox etc wiki-maps.

‘Modalities of United Statelessness’ Chapter 9 Abstract:

Book Launch: Monday, 14th September, 2020, Mapping Crisis: Participation, Datafication and Humanitarianism in the Age of Digital Mapping.

To safeguard human lives quickly and effectively in humanitarian disasters, OpenStreetMapping (OSM) interventions generate life-saving maps whilst placing the governance and authorship of the field data into the hands of the communities where it originated. 

Institutional data often do not exist in resource poor settings, and even where they do, hyper-local ‘expertise’ of citizen-generated data has an argued advantage of ‘trustworthiness’ over this more formal top-down information.  (Muttaqien, Ostermann, Lemmens: 2018) 

Although OSM may hold the dynamic potential to radically connect the physical with the digital, linking ‘situated knowledge’ in communities (the ‘specific’) with humanitarian overviews (the ‘universal’), this does not justify the indiscriminate mapping of ‘every corner of Africa’ simply for its own sake.

Exaggerated trust in new technology, too, can sometimes turn out to be dangerously ‘techno-colonial’, and actually detrimental to the safeguarding of human life. Where useful interventional maps depend on well-chosen words, often simpler and more lo-fi solutions have a more measurable impact. 

Digitally-enabled mobile infrastructures can now prove highly resilient, refuting traditional assumptions linking mobility with ‘disadvantage’. Across cultures, demonstrations of chosen itinerance are beginning to query ‘digital realism’, imposing plural ontologies of ‘place’, re-visiting traditions of ‘language-code’ in which technology manifests as ‘taxonomy’. In this, ideas of ‘locale’ emerge more as process than place.

This chapter draws upon experiences of refugee-mapping using ‘local knowledge, local people, and local tech’, and on attempts to convey data in a way that universally translates. It will use field-derived perspectives to debate the multiple narratives which OSM mapping (and OpenDataKit tooling) enables.

To see how this technology adapts to ground-breaking community-mapping of COVID Vulnerability and Food Deserts in deprived areas of the UK, follow THIS LINK.