Mapping Your Community
Which backyard in your neighborhood can still be used for planting vegetables and fruits? How many sewers in your community are not clogged and are well maintained? What are the different tourist spots and cultural activities in your neighborhood? What is the amount of rainfall in your community? What are the natural resources in your community and how are they preserved?
More often than not, you and your students are not completely aware of the actual geographic, economic, social, and political data and issues in the different areas within your community. Confined in the classrooms, you and your students just use textbooks and other general references to study community data and to establish your assumptions about your community.
However, community statistics and data raise important issues and, community issues call for community action. For you and your students to be able to discover, study, experience, appreciate, and act on the community you live in, you need to go out, survey and investigate the areas within your community, record observations and deduce perspective, and act together to address community issues. Experiential research experiments are effective education tools and one very useful project that you and your students can conduct together is Community Mapping.
What is Community Mapping?
When the word “mapping” is mentioned, you probably think of a traditional road map which tells you the location of a particular street or landmark and the directions on how to get there. A community map does the same thing and more --- community maps tell a neighborhood’s story.
A visual narrative, the community map is a collection of data about a neighborhood or a community that combines the community’s maps, images, and descriptive information about the community’s people, infrastructure, livelihood, culture, and more.
The first examples of community maps were born in the 1890s, when Jane Addams conducted a sociological survey of a Chicago neighborhood and published the Hull House Maps and Papers.1 Community mapping projects and methods have evolved since then and more and more young people from civic organizations and schools are getting involved. In the Philippines, government agencies and civic organizations engage and train people in various villages in the country to elicit community information, and socio-economic or environmental concerns from the locals themselves.
Why Community Mapping?
Thorough and well-sustained community mapping projects not only help your students use and hone their research and analysis skills, but also, and more importantly, enable them to shape their local surroundings. Because community maps show where and how people live, the information collected from mapping projects can be used to report community needs, concerns, or issues, to raise community awareness, and to address problems such as resources shortages, political conflicts, environmental crises, etc.
Communityplanning.net discusses some important benefits that the community and its people can get from mapping:2
- Additional Resources. Governments rarely have sufficient means to solve all the problems in an area. Local people can bring additional resources which are often essential if their needs are to be met and dreams fulfilled.
- Better Decisions. Local people are invariably the best source of knowledge and wisdom about their surroundings. Better decision-making results if this is harnessed.
- Building community. The process of working together and achieving things together creates a sense of community.
- Compliance with legislation. Community involvement is often, and increasingly, a statutory requirement.
- Democratic credibility. Community involvement in planning accords with people’s right to participate in decisions that affect their lives. It is an important part of the trend towards democratization of all aspects of society.
- Easier fundraising. Many grant-making organizations prefer, or even require, community involvement to have occurred before handing out financial assistance.
- Empowerment. Involvement builds local people’s confidence, capabilities, skills and
ability to co-operate. This enables them to tackle other challenges, both individually and collectively. - More appropriate results. Design solutions are more likely to be in tune with what is needed and wanted. Involvement allows proposals to be tested and refined before
adoption, resulting in better use of resources. - Professional education. Working closely with local people helps professionals gain a greater insight into the communities they seek to serve. So they work more
effectively and produce better results. - Responsive environment. The environment can more easily be constantly tuned and refined to cater for people⊃;s changing requirements.
- Satisfying public demand. People want to be involved in shaping their environment and mostly seem to enjoy it.
- Speedier development. People gain a better understanding of the options realistically available and are likely to start thinking positively rather than negatively. Time-wasting conflicts can often be avoided.
- Sustainability. People feel more attached to an environment they have helped create.
They will therefore manage and maintain it better, reducing the likelihood of vandalism, neglect and subsequent need for costly replacement.
Last year, the Smart Schools Program (SSP) website has incorporated basic community mapping principles and techniques into the monthly Gimmicks. Little do they know, teachers and students from active SSP partners have gathered pertinent community information and have already contributed to building their own community maps. In our Gimmicks like “Talasalitaan”, “Bayani ng Aking Bayan”, “Sikat Kami”, “Smart Sarap”, and “Trick and Treat”, participants told stories about their dialects, local heroes, famous people and dishes in their communities, and even local urban legends and folktales. When all these information, images, and stories are consolidated and analyzed, various community maps will be extracted and communities will greatly benefit from it!
Be it just a simple homework on community research or a community-wide mapping project, community maps truly are essential tools in the education, promotion, and development of our communities. Social change starts with the community and you and your students can start making the difference now.
Watch out for our Smart Tools Next Week: Community Mapping Methods and Techniques!
Sources:
1n.d. “Community Mapping Guide Overview”. Raise Your Voice Community Mapping Resource Guide. www.actionforchange.org. Retrieved February 12, 2008 from
http://www.actionforchange.org/mapping/history.html
2n.d. “Why get involved?”. About Community Planning. www.communityplanning.net. Retrieved February 12, 2008 from
http://www.communityplanning.net/whygetinvolved.htm
(Published 18 February 2008, Smart Schools Program)
