Community mapping examples

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.

Free/Open Source Research Tools

The International Journal of Conservation (Oryx) has a good list of free and open source research tools.

Zotero is my favourite.

URBAN methods paper published

The research design and methods paper for the URBAN (Understanding the Relationship Between physical Activity and Neighbourhood) study has been published in BMC Public Health. This is the project where I calculated walkability for neighbourhoods and use this to select neighbourhoods with high and low walkability for the study.

emm beddahbil kitteh

Here Kitteh, the first "dataset" I uploaded to Koordinates. She was a test kitteh and a work of ArcGIS art.


kitteh on Koordinates

Maori GIS Conference

The focus of the conference is Maori GIS projects and GIS related projects relevant to Maori aspirations. It is being held in Christchurch from 13-15 May 2009.

EOI for presenters close 15 April.

http://www.ngaitahu.iwi.nz/Events/2009/GIS-Maori-Conference/

Guide to Publishing in Geography

The handy guide to Publishing in Geography by RGS-IBG and Wiley-Blackwell.

Via Very Spatial.

Vipers and Vampires: Measuring Oil Vulnerability

Had a very interesting visitor yesterday: Jago Dodson from the Urban Research Program at Griffith University in Australia. Jago has published research on measurement of Oil Vulnerability in Australian cities eg:

Oil Vulnerability in the Australian City: Assessing Socioeconomic Risks from Higher Urban Fuel Prices (Dodson and Sipe, 2007)
Shocking the Suburbs: Urban Location, Housing Debt and Oil Vulnerability in the Australian City (Dodson and Sipe, 2006)

Oil vulnerability is measured by combining various census variables (mode of transport to work, number of cars in a household) and socioeconomic data (SEIFA) to produce the VIPER (Vulnerability Index for Petrol Expense Rise).

The VAMPIRE (Vulnerability Assessment for Mortgage,Petrol and Inflation Risks and Expenditure) is a measure of oil and mortgage vulnerability and includes mortgage information.

I decided to try this for a NZ city. Here is a quick lo-res attempt at an Auckland VIPER:

[caption id="attachment_28" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="VIPER index from 2006 census data. Dark = more vulnerable to oil price increases. Light = less vulnerable."][/caption]

Now I just need to find some mortgage data, cause even though VIPER is a pretty cool name, I love the idea of creating a VAMPIRE index!