Counter-mapping for a “pandemic-ready” city.

Keywords: resilience, urban environment, participatory methods, PPGIS
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 26

Abstract

Since the widespread disruption of the coronavirus pandemic, the term “post-pandemic” has emerged with the drive to return back to “normal life”. Whilst a problematic term, this paper considers the potential for a resilient “pandemic-ready” city by investigating how people use and relate to urban public spaces, to understand how individuals view their surrounding environments. Focusing on an area in London, the research uses participatory mapping methods to collate and visualise the experiences and perceptions of members of a community, specifically public participation GIS (PPGIS). The “Spraycan” tool specific to this research was designed by Huck, et al. (2014) and is a web-based platform that allows users to create spatial representations by spraying their thoughts/feelings onto a map. This paper provides an example of how PPGIS data can facilitate conversations and enable the sharing of experiences between community members and policymakers, to explore how communities perceive “good” or “bad” places and what this means in terms of utilising such spaces. It argues that such tools can produce alternative representations of space and their future possibilities, as part of a participatory, bottom-up approach to policymaking, to better understand community engagement with immediate urban environments for implementing better urban governance. Consequently, PPGIS like the spraycan offer an alternative method without reducing community voices to just points, lines and polygons on a map (Huck, et al. 2014). It enables researchers, practitioners, the community, and policymakers alike to reflect and consider how cities can become more “pandemic friendly” and resilient to such difficult conditions/circumstances.