The role of facilitated volunteered geographic information in the landscape planning and site design process

Over the last 40 years there has been a movement to increase opportunities for public participation in the decision and policy-making processes for design and planning projects. The emergence of online digital mapping systems and enhancements in Web technology to support sharing and collaboration have allowed the general public to generate their own spatial content via Web applications and other geospatially enabled devices. The resulting data from this recent phenomenon has been called Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). When facilitated through digital mapping interfaces, VGI can provide landscape architects and allied design professionals with local, detailed and spatial information that can be used to create a more informed design solution. This paper describes several digital interfaces the author has developed to elicit facilitated-VGI (f-VGI) over the past decade, and examines their use in community design projects and their lessons for implementing future f-VGI initiatives.     

Volunteered Geographic Information constructions in a contested terrain: A case of OpenStreetMap in China

The recent explosive growth of user-generated geographic information has drawn significant attention from GIS scholars and human geographers. Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) here refers to a key component of such a phenomenon, comprising both a range of practices of geographic information production and dissemination by volunteers as well as new forms of geospatial data produced and curated through various interactive online platforms and mobile devices such as OpenStreetMap (OSM) and Google Maps. VGI constructions have raised questions on spatial knowledge, power, and context. Through a study that examines social constructions of OSM in China, this paper makes two contributions to the existing literature: providing a political economic account of VGI constructions in China and exploring legalities in VGI research. Informed by research in critical GIS, this paper traces political economic transitions in relation to OSM constructions and examines OSM contributors' experiences and how these experiences constitute OSM development and usage. Drawing upon law and society research, this paper investigates how OSM mappers encounter the state's regulatory scheme of online mapping. This legality perspective of spatial data production and usage is a topic rarely explored in VGI studies. With interview data and document analysis, this paper unravels processes of powerful state institutional arrangements to control and invest in VGI simultaneously, entrepreneurs' interest in developing location-based services using VGI data, and experiences from a tech-savvy group in exploring and making VGI. While individual experiences vary, they show efforts of questioning embedded power relations shaping spatial data production in these continuously evolving, contested technoscientific and social landscapes.     

Volunteered geographic information: future research directions motivated by critical, participatory, and feminist GIS

New interactive web services are dramatically altering the way in which ordinary citizens can create digital spatial data and maps, individually and collectively, to produce new forms of digital spatial data that some term ‘volunteered geographic information’ (VGI). This article examines the early literature on this phenomenon, illustrating its shared propositions that these new technologies are part of shifts in the social and technological processes through which digital spatial data are produced, with accompanying implications for the content and characteristics of geospatial data, and the social and political practices promoted through their use. I illustrate how these debates about VGI conceive of spatial data as socially embedded, and suggest ways in which future research might productively draw upon conceptualizations from participatory, feminist, and critical GIS research that have emerged from similar foundations.     

When citizens choose not to participate in volunteering geographic information to e-governance: a case study from Mexico

Citizen participation is a crucial democratic practice in many western societies. In contemporary societies, different social agents utilise information and communication technology using Internet-based systems, to establish two-way communication in order to promote citizen participation. One such approach is volunteered geographical information (VGI). It is considered that VGI provides a new space for citizen engagement, as well as an arena for political contestation, however little attention has been paid to the reasons, drivers and limitations for voluntary citizen participation. Although there is an extensive literature on both VGI and citizen participation, this rarely considers how much citizen participation is necessary to run a VGI platform, what are the drivers for non-participation, and what happens within a democratic political space when citizens are apparently not interested to participate with a VGI deployment These topics are explored in this paper, through the lens of a particular case study of a University deployment for VGI developed in Mexico and a wider analysis of other VGI deployments taken from the literature. By critically assessing the extent to which the VGI deployments have enabled citizen participation, and the degree and quality of this participation, we draw conclusions as to how far and under what circumstances VGI can support government agencies to engage citizens in a meaningful dialogue as part of democratic governance initiatives. This leads us to identify key areas for further research by geographers and related social scientists exploring these socio-technical systems and their effects on democratic societies.     

Self-explanatory or just easy-to-use? A theoretical approach to the emancipatory potential of volunteered geographic information (VGI)

Volunteered geographic information (VGI) has fundamentally changed the way in which geoinformation is generated, distributed and handled. It entails manifold practices and discourses which are currently investigated from both affirmative and critical perspectives. Expanding on the range of theoretical approaches to VGI, this article explores the condition and the limits of VGI from a social theory perspective to explore the following questions: what is the basic structure of VGI both as a form of practice and a form of knowledge? What are aspects of integration and aspects of divergence with regard to VGI practices? Are there inherent limitations to VGI practices especially with regard to its emancipatory and educational potential? To approach these issues several established analytical frameworks are discussed, and a specific categorization of VGI’s symbolic geographies as interaction content will be introduced. Based on this categorization two opposed types of interaction practice can be distinguished: While information on VGI gathering and processing as a part of interaction content is vital to a competent use and deeper understanding of the system (“self-explanatory”) many interface designs have a very limited output in order to promote user-friendliness (“easy-to-use”). While the latter may increase the popularity of VGI it also limits interaction language to everyday language, to familiar spatial vocabularies of place, city, region, landscape or nation—instead of mediating technology’s spatialities or exploring more innovative ways of spatial representation.     

Volunteered geographic information and networked publics? Politics of everyday mapping and spatial narratives

The issue of a changing public that undertakes and underpins Volunteered geographic information (VGI) practices has not been discussed in depth in the existing literature. This paper seeks to tackle this issue of publics regarding the intersection between VGI and public participation GIS. I draw upon the notion of “networked publics” to illustrate the complexities of social relations intersecting with VGI practices. Networked publics involve a connected set of social and technological developments associated with the growing engagement with digitally connected media. Networked publics embody several major characteristics including multiple memberships spanning over vast locations and possibilities for horizontal connections and bottom-up engagements. I argue that the emergence and proliferation of VGI reflect the major characteristics of networked publics. Through two examples of VGI constructions in China, I depict types of networked publics involved in these processes. I show that the mutual constitution of networked publics and sociopolitical and technological transformations has produced new landscapes of civic engagement in China. I also show the limits and challenges of these VGI practices in this context. As such, this study contributes to the efforts of theorizing the geoweb through conceptualizing and foregrounding these new forms of social relations and interactions engaging with VGI practices, which in turn may entail new forms of knowledge production and politics.     

Confronting the data-divide in a time of spatial turns and volunteered geographic information

Geography is enjoying a period of unparalleled visibility, driven by the growing use of geographic methods and concepts across the sciences and humanities—the so-called spatial turn—and the pervasive use of geospatial Web technologies and their concomitant influence on society, especially the phenomenon of volunteered geographic information (VGI). The field of public health is beginning to harness spatiality with gusto; however, the geospatial Web and its social phenomena are underexplored in this context even though they may be particularly useful for public health enquiry, especially in low-resource settings that lack traditional data collection mechanisms. A case study framed within these two current phenomena is presented to illustrate the influence of geography and its potential for addressing the data-divide—the disparity in availability of data for scientific enquiry and decision-making most felt in low-and middle income countries. A facilitated VGI data collection initiative collected public health-related injury data in Cape Town, South Africa, as a pragmatic alternative given the lack of data from traditional sources. Emergency medical services personnel interacted with a GeoWeb interface to volunteer their informed opinions of high-incident injury locations. Previously unrecorded injury location data were created, and combined with traditional injury data for use in an ongoing study examining the environmental determinants of injury in this setting, which speaks to the possibility for hybrid authoritative/asserted data collection strategies. This study speaks to the growing influence of geography and one of its driving forces, the techno-social revolution in geospatial technology and data. Future work should continue to examine their potential to address the data-divide.     

Using Volunteered Geographic Information to measure name changes of artificial geographical features as a result of political changes: a Libya case study

Over the past few years, political systems have changed in several countries of the Middle East as a result of citizen revolutions on the ruling regimes. These geopolitical changes have had effects on the names of artificial geographical features, such as roads and schools. Many of the names, especially those that were associated with previous regimes, were changed to become associated with the revolutions, their dates, their leaders, or their martyrs. The recent change in the paradigm of Web use towards data sharing and crowd-sourcing in the Web 2.0 provides new opportunities to get insight into a local community’s perception of political events. Crowd-sourced spatial data, often referred to as Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), can be contributed and accessed through various websites and data repositories. These data can supplement traditional data sources, such as road maps hosted by governmental offices. Libya’s governmental maps of urban infrastructure are scarce and incomplete. This provides an incentive for citizens and grassroots groups to collect and generate spatial data on their own and to express changed realities of feature names by the means of crowd-sourced mapping. Using two districts in Libya this study evaluates for five Web 2.0 platforms (OpenStreetMap, Wikimapia, Google Map Maker, Panoramio, and Flickr) to which extent VGI reflects name changes of geographical features as a result of the revolution in 2011. Other data sources, such as school directories posted by teachers on Facebook, serve as additional information for feature name change detection. Results show that the extent to which VGI reflects name changes based on the 2011 revolution in Libya varies strongly between VGI data sources. VGI provides a useful supplement to limited governmental resources to better understand how names of artificial geographical features are affected by changes in political systems.     

资源型城市矿业废弃地分类与再利用模式

资源型城市的粗放发展模式已不能适应当前城市绿色发展的要求,矿业废弃地严重阻碍了资源型城市的转型发展进程,如何对矿业废弃地进行合理再利用成为资源型城市转型亟待解决的问题。以我国262个资源型城市为案例地,筛选出117个矿业废弃地改造项目。根据矿区的内源性因素,划分出地表形态、分布区位、矿产类型3大类别,并剖析各个类别的特点;基于生态-经济-社会效益视角,归纳出7类再利用模式和10种改造方向;综合考虑战略任务、发展需求及再利用目标3方面的因素,提出矿业废弃地综合再利用思路。     

Discovering points of interest from users’ map annotations

One of the potential problems of volunteered geographic information (VGI) is ensuring its quality. Innocent mistakes and intentional falsehoods can reduce not only the quality of the information, but also people’s confidence in VGI as a legitimate source of data. We present a case study in VGI that addresses the quality problem by aggregating input from many different people. Specifically, we present a technique to maintain a comprehensive list of points of interest (POI) for digital maps. This is traditionally difficult, because new POI are created, because some POI are known only locally, and because some POI have multiple names. We address this problem by exploiting map annotations contributed by regular, online map users. Our institution’s mapping Web site allows users to create arbitrary collections of geographically anchored pushpins that are annotated with text. Our data mining solution finds geometric clusters of these pushpins and examines the pushpins’ text and other features for likely POI names. For instance, if a given text phrase is mentioned frequently in a cluster, but infrequently elsewhere, this increases our confidence that this phrase names a POI. We tested the quality of our results by asking 100 local residents whether or not the POI we found were correct, and our user study told us we were generally successful. We also show how we can use the same user-annotated pushpins to assess the popularity of existing POI, which is a guide for which ones to display on a map.     

From feeding the locals to selling the locale: Adapting local sustainable food projects in Niagara to neocommunitarianism and neoliberalism

This paper traces attempts to foster local, sustainable food projects in Niagara, Canada as part of community economic development (CED) projects during two distinct periods of provincial governance. In the first period (1990-1995), social democratic government support for local sustainable food projects through CED can be understood as neocommunitarian in nature. During this time there was a concerted attempt to link local people with access to local food and also to support a relationship between local food projects and agri-tourism. I argue that this neocommunitarian policy was an accommodation to a wider and more global neoliberal hegemony and was underlain by a romanticism of petty commodity production and a tenuous link to social and ecological sustainability. In the second period of governance (beginning in 1995) the progressive conservative government led by Mike Harris pursued particularly virulent, revanchist forms of neoliberal governance. With many of their state supports slashed, Niagara NGOs and activists turned, and were pushed, to more market-led, elitist forms of local food projects and agri-tourism. In these latter food projects, the practices of ecological and social sustainability were significantly hollowed out and their local and light green nature was harnessed as accumulation strategies. The paper is based on interviews conducted in the year 2003 with people involved in various urban and rural food projects (including community gardening, community supported agriculture, local/seasonal cuisine, organic/ecological farming and food box programs).     

The credibility of volunteered geographic information

The proliferation of information sources as a result of networked computers and other interconnected devices has prompted significant changes in the amount, availability, and nature of geographic information. Among the more significant changes is the increasing amount of readily available volunteered geographic information. Although volunteered information has fundamentally enhanced geographic data, it has also prompted concerns with regard to its quality, reliability, and overall value. This essay situates these concerns as issues of information and source credibility by (a) examining the information environment fostering collective information contribution, (b) exploring the environment of information abundance, examining credibility and related notions within this environment, and leveraging extant research findings to understand user-generated geographic information, (c) articulating strategies to discern the credibility of volunteered geographic information (VGI), including relevant tools useful in this endeavor, and (d) outlining specific research questions germane to VGI and credibility.     

Mapping the data shadows of Hurricane Sandy: Uncovering the sociospatial dimensions of ‘big data’

Digital social data are now practically ubiquitous, with increasingly large and interconnected databases leading researchers, politicians, and the private sector to focus on how such ‘big data’ can allow potentially unprecedented insights into our world. This paper investigates Twitter activity in the wake of Hurricane Sandy in order to demonstrate the complex relationship between the material world and its digital representations. Through documenting the various spatial patterns of Sandy-related tweeting both within the New York metropolitan region and across the United States, we make a series of broader conceptual and methodological interventions into the nascent geographic literature on big data. Rather than focus on how these massive databases are causing necessary and irreversible shifts in the ways that knowledge is produced, we instead find it more productive to ask how small subsets of big data, especially georeferenced social media information scraped from the internet, can reveal the geographies of a range of social processes and practices. Utilizing both qualitative and quantitative methods, we can uncover broad spatial patterns within this data, as well as understand how this data reflects the lived experiences of the people creating it. We also seek to fill a conceptual lacuna in studies of user-generated geographic information, which have often avoided any explicit theorizing of sociospatial relations, by employing Jessop et al.’s TPSN framework. Through these interventions, we demonstrate that any analysis of user-generated geographic information must take into account the existence of more complex spatialities than the relatively simple spatial ontology implied by latitude and longitude coordinates.     

Opportunities provided by geographic information systems and volunteered geographic information for a timely emergency response during flood events in Cologne,Germany

The occurrence of disasters such as extreme flooding in urban environments has severe consequences, not only on the human population but also on critical infrastructures such as the road networks, which are of vital importance for everyday living and particularly for emergency response. In this article, our main goal is to present-conceptually and in praxis-a model that could be used from the emergency responders for timely and efficient emergency management and response in an urban complex environment. For the city of Cologne in Germany, we aim to indicate possible ways to decrease the emergency response time during an extreme flood scenario through the development of an accessibility indicator, which consists of different components. Therefore, we will investigate the opportunities that occur, in a flood risk scenario, from the use of geographic information in different forms such as Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) and open-source data in an ArcGIS environment, to increase urban resilience through the decreasing emergency response time. We will focus on network analysis for the fire brigades (first acting emergency responders) during a flood scenario to calculate their emergency response ranges and emergency response routes through flooded road networks, for the assistance of the possibly affected hospitals, refugee homes and fire brigades, which can be flooded. At the end of the paper, we suggest that the vulnerable community of the refugees could be taken into consideration as a new source of VGI, as an additional component that would lead to the decrease in the emergency response time. The geo-located information that could be provided by the refugee community can be very useful in emergency situations, such as those examined in this article where timely information can be forwarded to the proper authorities for a more focused and timely emergency response, increasing the resilience of the urban population and their community.     

Opportunities provided by geographic information systems and volunteered geographic information for a timely emergency response during flood events in Cologne,Germany

The occurrence of disasters such as extreme flooding in urban environments has severe consequences, not only on the human population but also on critical infrastructures such as the road networks, which are of vital importance for everyday living and particularly for emergency response. In this article, our main goal is to present-conceptually and in praxis-a model that could be used from the emergency responders for timely and efficient emergency management and response in an urban complex environment. For the city of Cologne in Germany, we aim to indicate possible ways to decrease the emergency response time during an extreme flood scenario through the development of an accessibility indicator, which consists of different components. Therefore, we will investigate the opportunities that occur, in a flood risk scenario, from the use of geographic information in different forms such as Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) and open-source data in an ArcGIS environment, to increase urban resilience through the decreasing emergency response time. We will focus on network analysis for the fire brigades (first acting emergency responders) during a flood scenario to calculate their emergency response ranges and emergency response routes through flooded road networks, for the assistance of the possibly affected hospitals, refugee homes and fire brigades, which can be flooded. At the end of the paper, we suggest that the vulnerable community of the refugees could be taken into consideration as a new source of VGI, as an additional component that would lead to the decrease in the emergency response time. The geo-located information that could be provided by the refugee community can be very useful in emergency situations, such as those examined in this article where timely information can be forwarded to the proper authorities for a more focused and timely emergency response, increasing the resilience of the urban population and their community.

     

Is VGI participation? From vernal pools to video games

This paper examines the relationship between public participatory GIS (PPGIS) and volunteered geographic information (VGI). A brief review of the history of PPGIS reveals similarities between the two but also provides examples of how these two areas have developed in ways that cause the boundaries between them to be unclear at times. As evidence for advancing this conversation, 2 case studies are presented: volunteers mapping vernal pools and park design in Second Life. These case studies demonstrate both the intertwined nature of some aspects of VGI and PPGIS, while also showing some aspects of divergence.     

New technologies, old divides: linking internet access to social and locational characteristics of US farms

Access to new information and communication technologies is widely viewed as a prerequisite for participation in the global economy, so that inequalities in such access have become a significant policy concern. Rural areas are especially underserved in terms of internet providers, and this is true in both developed and less developed economies. This article focuses on access to the internet within farming operations in the US as an important aspect of understanding the digital divide within rural areas. Using county level data from the 2007 US Census of Agriculture and multivariate regression analysis, our study examines the statistical relationship between farm internet access and a set of explanatory factors which include demographic characteristics of operators, economic characteristics of farms, and geographic location (region and metropolitan status) of the farm. Further, it seeks to understand whether access to the internet can be socially and locationally differentiated from access to high speed internet. Our findings indicate that existing social divides are replicated in terms of the digital divide, so that social inequalities are potentially a more pressing problem than infrastructural gaps in terms of rural access to the internet in the US.     

We are not all the same!: Comparative climate change vulnerabilities among fishers in Old Harbour Bay,Jamaica

There is a general consensus that Small Island Developing States are among the most vulnerable to experience climate injustices. Vulnerability studies of climate change effects on communities have often focused on differences between communities given these climate injustices. However, there is a need to also focus on vulnerability within communities, referred to here as comparative vulnerabilities. Climate justice therefore becomes even more important with more focused attention given to the nuances within groups that fall within the vulnerable category. This article examines comparative vulnerabilities for the fishing community in Jamaica. A survey of 241 fishers from Old Harbour Bay, the largest fishing village in Jamaica, was conducted to examine the level of vulnerability of different fishers to climate change. A vulnerability index was constructed for the community and then comparative vulnerabilities were determined based on socio-demographic characteristics. Overall for the sample 46.9% of respondents would be considered as experiencing a comparatively high level of vulnerability to climate change. Climate change vulnerability was influenced by a number of socio-demographic variables with unique profiles emerging for groups that can be ranked as low, moderate, and high vulnerability. The paper therefore argues that within vulnerable populations there are comparative vulnerabilities based on economic factors and social capital, which must be taken into consideration for adaptation strategies to be implemented. Given these comparative vulnerabilities a more targeted approach to coping and adaptation strategies can then be taken. This will assist in building resilience of these communities that must now adjust to a new normal with climate change effects currently occurring.     

Social policy and social inequality in Nigeria: Examples from four states,using indicators of level of living approach

Summary and Conclusion In this paper, it has been demonstrated that wide disparities exist among the various local government areas of different states of Nigeria, notwithstanding the country's golden social policy goal of building an egalitarian and oppresion-free society. If the results obtained in the four states used as case studies above are anything to go by then Nigeria has to be more serious in developing ways and means of bridging the gap between the advantaged and the disadvantaged areas of the country. Part of this would involve more positive discrimination in favour of the less privileged areas in subsequent resource allocations by governments, community leaders and individual philanthropists (Oyebanji 1984). Really there is no doubt that if all areas had equal amount of influence in the manner that common resources are distributed, there definitely would have been greater degree of equality. In general, the relatively more advanced areas in each state are either urban centers and/or the seat of government — whether state or local government — or those in which the efforts of governments have been heavily subsidized through community self-help projects. The reality of this situation in the Nigerian environment has already been established elsewhere (Oyebanji 1980). Consequently it will be of immense benefit to the states under study to promote both widespread urbanization on the one hand and the spirit of self-involvement on the other hand.Despite the social relevance of this type of research however, the limitation imposed by lack of valuable and reliable data in Nigeria is extremely serious. Nevertheless, if the social state of the nation has to be carefully monitored, there must be a very marked improvement in the present social data bank of the country. As the present study has emphasized, data on many vital aspects of level of living are either dearth or non-existent altogether. Consequently, social reporting in Nigeria currently has a long way to go. It is therefore important to point out that for now the results of this and similar studies should be regarded as exploratory but nevertheless very valuable.     

Community forests and regeneration in post-industrial landscapes

Through a critique of existing regeneration literatures the paper points to the close relationship between regeneration and sustainable development. It suggests that the economic aspects of sustainable development have tended to dominate: leading to the neglect of nature in both regeneration and sustainable development, with regeneration having a principal focus on socio-economic issues in urban settings. To address these lacunae we suggest the need for a more environmentally sensitive regeneration theory. Using this approach the paper draws on recent in-depth research in three post-industrial coalfield areas where regeneration processes operate in the form of community forest projects. It provides a critical perspective on these regeneration processes, integrating theory with empirical data and highlighting how nature is drawn into broader economic and social processes of regeneration. In conclusion, using forestry initiatives as examples, we reflect on the conceptual dissonance apparent in regeneration theory and practice, and point to theoretical insights that could enable a more critical regeneration theory; more beneficial outcomes to regeneration processes; and an improved understanding of the relations between nature, capital and community in regeneration processes and sustainable development.