Crowdsourcing and Participatory Mapping in Community Engagement

Written by Mel Throckmorton

Participatory mapping provides a bottom-up approach to planning, by inviting stakeholders to identify and contribute their spatial knowledge to planning processes. As part of a larger effort on reviewing literature on identifying and preserving cultural resources – tangible and intangible community assets with cultural significance and importance to place identity – I reviewed a number of map-based tools that were created for this purpose. I found that within this category, there were different goals, processes for data collection and engagement, and outcomes, but what they all had in common was that they relied heavily on local knowledge. Local knowledge was accessed through crowdsourcing through both traditional and digital means to create context-rich visual representations of their communities that can be viewed by anyone, and can serve a role in decision-making. While these techniques have the potential to expand the sources and stories that planners can hear, we must examine our assumptions about technology’s role in the planning process.

Planners and advocates have increasingly turned to digital tools to facilitate engagement with the public, a push that coincides with the rise of “smart cities” – a movement which calls for optimizing city processes by integrating more technology into the physical and planning aspects of cities, with the idea that technology will improve quality of life. This relies on the assumption that technology expands access to democracy by expanding reach to groups that have been historically underrepresented in the planning process, yet this does not necessarily expand access to decision-making. Through the use of crowdsourcing and participatory mapping, the public can, in theory, be directly engaged in the planning process by contributing invaluable local knowledge and spatial data from a wider range of stakeholders, serving as “sensors” within the smart city framework. When well-integrated into the planning process, this data can contribute to success in meeting desired planning outcomes. 

Crowdsourcing and Public Participation

Crowdsourcing, a practice borrowed from the business world of soliciting solutions to problems from a wider and largely non-professional audience, has been increasingly utilized in conjunction with these tools to enhance public participation under the argument that by opening a pathway for direct public input, these processes become inherently more democratic. Crowdsourcing does create a channel for public contribution, but contribution alone does not guarantee democratic participation, with a key question being whether public knowledge affects decision-making or merely supplies data to institutions that retain control. Arnstein’s Ladder provides a framework for understanding how this labor translates into outcomes in the planning process, whether it is facilitated by professional planners or those operating outside of it. The bottom rungs of the ladder (under “non-participation” and “tokenism” are comprised of engagement techniques that can be classified as extractive – taking resources (knowledge, time) from the public without any meaningful transfer of control.

When examining the use of crowdsourcing as referenced by researchers in the literature, I found that approaches were variable in the effort of in-person citizen engagement, and although direct access may have been granted in concept through digital tools, barriers such as the digital divide and representativeness persisted. While enabling planners to cast a wider net for engagement, it is unclear if the tools created by planners using knowledge crowdsourced from the public actually effected planning decisions in a meaningful way. For instance, efforts in 2012 to create an “Austin Historical Survey Wiki” that was open to public submissions of historic sites was presented with much excitement, yet seemingly failed to gain momentum due to disconnect between the City and the public and is now defunct. In contrast, similar tools from this time period such as “HistoricPlacesLA” continue to be updated consistently, connecting the public to current and future decision-making and the impact it may have on their communities. 

Mapping as Grassroots Preservation 

Outside of formal planning processes, activists and grassroots preservationists utilize these same tools to bring increased visibility to spaces and communities that have been harmed or shut out of decision-making, as well as subverting dominant spatial narratives by providing context to attention to sites of loss, joy, and injustice. 

The “Texas Freedom Colonies Atlas” is one such project created and maintained by Dr. Andrea Roberts, the Director of the Center for Cultural Landscapes at the University of Virginia, with the goal of documenting and preserving cultural properties associated with African American freedom colonies in Texas. The project relies on crowdsourcing key spatial and historical information from descendants, who are largely dispersed, and who may provide additional artifacts such as memories, documents, and photos, via an embedded survey that allows them to add points to the map directly. The website functions not just as a map, but as a storytelling and educational device that illustrates the attempted erasure of Black rural legacies through displacement in the American South. 

The Lakeland Community Heritage Project hosts a similar map that shows the former sites of homes, community spaces, and businesses in the historically Black neighborhood of Lakeland, located in College Park, which was destroyed under urban renewal – and which a recent local exhibit is striving to recreate through archival imagery. These efforts can be considered “countermapping”, a process of using maps to make visible the power relations around which physical space is structured. Through visualizing displacement, both projects assert histories that appear to have been hidden instead of lost, and make a case for restorative justice. 

A screengrab from the Lakeland Historic Streetscape Tour depicting the location of a family home in what is now Lake Artemesia

Mapping Tools as Community Engagement 

Online tools have made it possible for anyone to create and share their own maps, with free alternatives to ArcGIS like OpenStreetMap, QGIS, and Google My Maps being available to users with a range of skills. For planners and researchers, facilitating the collection of spatial data from the public has become increasingly easier due to tools with embedded surveys such as Survey123 and Maptionnaire, allowing users to add geocoded data points to the map directly. However, it is unclear if the use of these tools contributes to fresh perspectives, or if it continues to attract the usual suspects. Those executing these types of projects with community engagement in mind would be remiss to assume that they are reaching a representative sample by just using technology alone. A review of these tools in the literature reviewed suggests that the use of these tools should be complementary to, and not a replacement for, a robust community engagement process. 

Often after reviewing an article about a mapping tool, I would go to find it and find that it either no longer existed, or was not available to the public. This raised the question of accessibility, and if the public, being consulted in the creation of the data, should have a right to view it and know how it is used. If so, how responsive should this resource be? In the case of the City of Austin’s attempt to create the “Austin Historical Survey Wiki”, the failure of the project to take off was attributed to the lack of meaningful connection that the public could draw between their participation and the impact on the planning process. For the “Texas Freedom Colonies Atlas”, Roberts herself has documented her co-planning approach that reinforced the significance of what expertise and knowledge participants had to offer, making it clear that what was being collected transcended data points. While these projects similarly relied on crowdsourcing as a form of participant engagement, it can be argued that Roberts’ success has been based on her ability to make process and outcome meaningful to participants.

Conclusion

Technology has augmented the planning process by offering more points of access to the public. Crowdsourcing and participatory mapping are just two of the ways in which it has been introduced to community engagement, with the enhanced ability to collect key data in hopes of improving local processes. Outsiders can also utilize these methods to bring visibility and advocacy to issues that are often overlooked or ignored in planning discussions. 

A review of literature on interactive tools made for the purpose of identifying and protecting culturally and historically significant local resources demonstrated that technology alone does does not erase some of the common problems that arise when engaging the public. In these examples, planners and researchers that engaged the public in more meaningful ways with alignment on outcomes were more likely to be effective.