GrassrootsMapping
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Techniques and tools for people who want to make maps. Includes readings and case studies on grassroots mapping projects.
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What is Grassroots Mapping?
A grassroots map of San Ignacio Loyola in Lima, Peru, produced in January 2010.
Grassroots Mapping (see main web site) is a series of participatory mapping projects involving communities in cartographic dispute. This January, Jeffrey Warren of the MIT Media Lab (media.mit.edu) and the Center for Future Civic Media worked with a series of organizations and communities to produce maps with children and adults from several communities in Lima, including the Cantagallo settlement of Shipibo on the bank of the Rimac and the Juan Pablo II community in Villa El Salvador.
Seeking to invert the traditional power structure of cartography, the grassroots mappers used helium balloons and kites to loft their own “community satellites” made with inexpensive digital cameras. The resulting images, which are owned by the residents, are georeferenced and stitched into maps which are 100x higher resolution that those offered by Google, at extremely low cost. In some cases these maps may be used to support residents’ claims to land title. By creating open-source tools to include everyday people in exploring and defining their own geography, Warren hopes to enable a diverse set of alternative agendas and practices, and to emphasize the fundamentally narrative and subjective aspects of mapping over its use as a medium of control.
Participate/Get started
To assemble your own balloon or kite rig, check out these links:
And be sure to join the mailing list so other mappers can offer advice. A good first step is to introduce yourself and tell us where you’d like to make a map.
Looking for a tough problem? Check out the Advanced Projects page; we’re looking to try these out as improvements over our existing tools!
Grassroots mappers Jeff and Hector fly a balloon photography rig at San Ignacio Loyola in Lima, Peru.
Projects
A variety of projects have evolved both as a followup to the Grassroots Mapping Lima project and independently - here is a list of such projects and their participants:
- Grassroots Mapping Lima - A January 2010 project with CEDRO - supported by the Center for Future Civic Media and MIT’s Legatum Center
- Grassroots Mapping Belize - Pat Coyle of Belize Open Source Sustainable Development is looking to apply these techniques to detailed mapping of a 40-acre property in northwest Belize and for other community mapping initiatives.
- Nu Vu Workshop: a 2-week intensive workshop is planned in late April as part of the NuVu Studio educational program in Cambridge, MA
- Illustrated Guide - A project to develop a simple, illustrated guide to Grassroots Mapping - Pat Coyle and Jeffrey Warren
- Curriculum Development - Various efforts to develop a youth curriculum around the practice of Grassroots Mapping
- Department Of Play - Working group at the MIT Center for Civic Media of like-minded researchers and community practitioners working toward an open source mapping and media storytelling toolkit full of tools & pedagogy to support youth participation in their local communities
- Grassroots Coral Mapping Sumatra - Crispen Wilson of Konservasi.org is mapping coral reefs in Sumatra at high and low tide.
- Grassroots Mapping Coal River - West Virginia project documenting health and environmental threats of mountaintop mining on and near Cherry Pond Mountain
- Grassroots Mapping Gulf Coast Oil Spill
A photo showing everything needed to begin making maps with balloons or kites. Click to enlarge.
Tools
Aerial Photography
Take pictures from the air using balloons or kites, then stitch them together and rectify them to create a base map. A kind of ’peoples satellite’!
- Kite Aerial Photography - Take pictures from kites
- Balloon Aerial Photography - Take pictures from weather balloons
- Cartagen Knitter - Easily upload and warp/stitch images into a map on a web page
- Map Warper - Use aerial photographs or scanned drawings to produce a rectified, spatially accurate map in KML or GeoRSS.
Experimental Tools
These tools are in development and may not yet be working.
- Helium Kite - Fly a kite that’s filled with helium in any weather
- Photo Sextant - Fix your location using just a cameraphone
- Uav Photography - Autopiloted model aircraft with onboard cameras
People
- Jeffrey Warren of the MIT Media Lab’s Center for Future Civic Media (Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA)
- Carla Del Carpio of CEDRO (Lima, Peru)
- Seth Hunter of the MIT Media Lab (Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA)
- Josh Levinger of the MIT Media Lab’s Center for Future Civic Media (Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA)
- Edward Jaser of the Royal Scientific Society of Jordan (Amman, Jordan - see related blog post on balloon tests at the RSS)
- Pat Coyle of Belize Open Source Sustainable Development - see Grassroots Mapping Belize
- Crispen Wilson of Konservasi.org is exploring Grassroots Coral Mapping Sumatra
Related Work and Organizations
- MapKibera.org - Mikel Maron and the Open Street Map? Humanitarian Team’s work in Kenya
- Kite and Balloon mapping notes by Dr. Ramon (more recent blog post)
- John Arroyo’s LA River Mapping Series, at MIT Colab
We’re also gathering writings, essay editing documentation, and other sources of information on grassroots mapping (broadly defined) here:
Reading List
Feel free to add additional works!