I recently gave a talk about community mapping at a Living Streets Aotearoa meeting. This post contains the examples of community mapping that I mentioned in the talk. All these examples all fall within my general area of research, i.e. social health and wellbeing, and almost all of these examples use google maps.
Note: By “community mapping” I mean maps made by the community. There are other things it might possible be called or related to: neogeography, participatory mapping, volunteered geographic information, collaborative mapping etc. I didn’t have time to figure out the appropriate name.
Example 1: Mapping the location of fruit and urban edibles
- City Fruit (Seattle)
- Bloomington Urban Harvest
- Fernwood Fruit Tree Project
- Fitzroy Feral Fruit Map
- New Zealand Fruit and Food Share Map
Example 2: Bicycle routes
- MapMyRide
- Bikely
- Ride the City – safe bike routes in NYC,. This is more a map for the community than a map by the community, but I thought it was interesting
Example 3: Walkability & Cycleability audits
- Woodbridge Township Safe Routes to School project – schools & community participate in walkability audits to figure out safe routes to school.
Example 4 – Mapping perceptions of the environment
- Rescue Geography’s Eastside project – not all these are collaborative, but there are interesting google earth and google maps that include stories, quotes, photos, video and ambinet sounds of the city. There is also an interesting cycling perceptions project underway.
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