Geography for development: mapping for change



Who doesn't love a good idea! Here's one, aerial mapping of a community space in Palestine by attaching a regular camera to a kite. So picture this..."tampering" with a regular camera and attaching it to a kite that flies overhead your community allows for a aerial perspective of your local space; piloted by Palestinian youth make it even better. This stems from the Voices Beyond Walls organization, a collective of independent Palestinian and international media technologists, filmmakers, photographers, educators, and activists that hold digital storytelling workshops with the youth in the refugee camps in the West Bank.

Here's another kind of mapping: in Kibera, Nairobi, digital mapping of this "blank spot" on Google maps becomes richly detailed through the initiative of local information surveying and sharing to create a digital public map of their own community. And why should one care? Well, besides its invisibility online, it has more pragmatic purposes. Community maps allow for the planning of policy and practice initiatives. Kibera, in spite of its Hollywood fame, having been featured in Fernando Meirelles's film The Constant Gardener, is also a region which is one of the largest slums in Africa that is in dire need of attention. This project stems from the Map Kibera initiative, drawing from local participation through smsing on updates of their local space for planning, navigation, and community rejuvenation.

There are other kinds of mapping too...mobile traffic mapping during earthquakes, mapping of the virtual economy flow to understand the scope of digital labor in developing countries to mapping of hotspots of artists in Poland as tourist online guides. In fact, mapping seems to have gained tremendous attention amongst development practitioners as they look at capturing spaces as a platform to addressing issues such as youth education, healthcare, urban planning, emergency relief and more.

That said, who is actually using such maps is a looming question still. While very powerful to gain grants from sponsors and funders and legitimacy amongst INGOs, the actual locals are often unaware of the entire lifelines of such projects...

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