Community Mapping

What is community mapping? 

Community mapping involves identifying the features of a neighbourhood to create a picture of what it is like to live there. The resulting map can be used by residents, community groups, and local authorities to help understand the area and drive collective action.

Features which can be mapped include assets (like community centres, libraries, and parks), as well as hazards and barriers (like busy roads, unsafe buildings, and fire risks) and even community groups, and local people’s knowledge and abilities. All of these things can create a picture of a community to shows its strengths, vulnerabilities, capacities, and potential for improvement.

Typically, community mapping involves input from local people (who know the area best); this is often called participatory mapping. It is important to engage with a diverse range of community members, including people from different socio-economic backgrounds, professions, genders, age groups, and ethnicities. All these factors affect a person’s experience and engagement within a community, which results in varied and unique perspectives on the area. Providing options for in-person or remote mapping will increase the accessibility of a transect walk, as well as ensuring that the route is fully wheelchair accessible and including rest stops and toilet breaks. By involving community members, the mapping process can also become a tool for community engagement and accountability, by providing skills and meaningful access to information. Maps are visual and easy to relate to; like photos and videos, they can inspire conversations and cut through communication difficulties. Community mapping can encourage people to become advocates for the places they live in and enable positive transformations that benefit local people. It can also help foster a sense of connectedness and community responsibility. All of this, alongside the benefits of the map itself, helps to strengthen a community's resilience to crises (for example: weather-related disasters, fires, economic or housing crises, disease outbreak, and power shortages) and its ability to withstand change. 

The British Red Cross and the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent have a number of tools which are useful for deciding how to map an area - you can find this here. One of these tools is called a transect walk. This is extremely helpful for building an initial picture of the issues and capacities within a community, as well as validating data that has been mapped separately. It involves walking around an area to observe and document the people, the surroundings and the resources. Watch the video below for a quick overview of a recent transect walk taken by the Community Resilience Team in Barking and Dagenham.

Community mapping in Barking & Dagenham

This month we ran one such transect walk in collaboration with the Thames Ward Community Project (TWCP) in Barking & Dagenham. We met with Lai (who is also a Community Resilience Advocate volunteer) and Matt from the TWCP and Alan, the leader of the local Residents Association, who guided us on a two hour walk around the area. Our route took us from the Sue Bramley Centre, near the Thames View Estate, right up to the Riverside area, which is currently undergoing intensive development. We made several stops along the way, including at 'The Big Shops,' a faith centre, an industrial estate, different green spaces, and several schools.

Gathering local expertise

While we were walking, Alan, Matt and Lai talked about their experiences of living and working in an area that is rapidly changing and the complications that these developments present for the the existing community.

One such complication is that many housing developments are built without considering all the other essential services that people need. In this particular area, the local population has increased dramatically, but local health care services have not been expanded. As a result, the existing GP surgery is oversubscribed and it is difficult for residents to get appointments.

Insights like this from residents and invested community members were able to provide us with a much richer understanding of the area that we could not have gained without their knowledge. For future exercises we will aim to prioritise gathering input from more local people, and include stops for talks with residents on our routes.

Assets and Hazards

During the walk we documented various assets and hazards. Assets included shops, schools, green spaces and community gardens, which can help increase the resilience of a community by providing a multitude of benefits: cleaner air, increased biodiversity, a space for people to exercise and connect with each other, improved nutrition and food security, and more permeable ground to reduce the risk of flooding.

We also discussed hazards such as the wooden cladding involved in the 2019 Barking Riverside fire, limited health facilities, and air pollution created by developments. Some hazards were more intangible and harder to document: a sense of disconnectedness between areas, the obvious wealth disparity between housing developments, and the feeling of uncertainty that arises when a place is perpetually a ‘work in progress.’ All of these things are barriers to social cohesion, which can have a big impact on a communities ability to respond and recover from an emergency.

Tools for mapping

Throughout the walk, our team used various techniques to map features of the area that are relevant to community resilience. This included data collection tools such as KOBO, Solstice, Mymaps from Google, WhatsApp, Mapillary, video and photography, a pen and paper, and remote mapping. Out of these tools, KoBo and MyMaps were the ones which allowed us to collect and analyse data in the most easy and intuitive way; WhatsApp enabled us to easily document the area, but required more time to process and understand the information after the exercise; film and photography was a fun way to capture the area, but didn’t connect the footage to a map of locations; and the data produced by Solstice was more complicated to interpret.

Looking forward

This type of exercise helps to increase knowledge of the communities that the Community Resilience Team works with. They are a great way to strengthen connections between community groups and members, and to start important conversations about what people want and need in their local area. In the future, the team will be running similar workshops across all of the 6 boroughs they work in (Waltham Forest, Redbridge, Barking and Dagenham, Croydon, Newham, and Southwark) with the help of community resilience advocate volunteers.

The aim is for the resulting maps to be compiled on a central platform, where they will be available for communities to access and use. Local Authorities will also be able to access these maps, which will then help to facilitate emergency response and spark conversation about the use of community resources and spaces.

The Resilience Standards for London Local Government, set out in 2019, specified the following desirable outcomes to improve Community Resilience:

Community mapping workshops like this can help to achieve these outcomes by creating processes for involving groups in emergency management, enabling networking and relationship building, and helping maintain up to date information about the hazards, assets, risks, and resilience of an area. In doing so, these communities will be better equipped and informed to prepare, respond, and recover from emergencies.

If you have questions or queries about anything you have read, or are interested in collaborating with the Community Resilience team, please do not hesitate to contact us at CommunityResilienceLondon@redcross.org.uk.