Social Mapping – how we use places socially and how to map them
Everything we do is situated in place – one of the key tenants of human geography and urban planning and design – academic disciplines that are contributing to the Public Map Platform – is that place is constituted through, and in turn constitutes, human activity. We are made in, and make, places. Place is fundamental to human existence and human social life.
Place makes a difference to how we act socially – a well-designed play space for children will encourage them to play together, use different physical skills, and develop their social abilities through play. A poorly-designed space will do the opposite: children will find it boring, and it will consequently be neglected. We know that nature spaces are important for socialisation at all ages. It is not uncommon for young people to use nearby nature spaces (local woodland, paths, beaches) as places to socialise away from the purview of adults; whereas adults value these spaces as ones to take young children for mucky play, to exercise and socialise together with other adults. How much ‘social space’ there is for particular groups matters – we know that there is significant under-investment in dedicated spaces for young people – youth centres have closed over the last decade and young people are typically unwelcome in ‘adult’ spaces. When young people are seen ‘hanging out’ in some urban contexts, they are often regarded by adults as a nuisance or threatening. So – where do they go to hang out? What public spaces are, should or could be those used by young people to socialise safely but independently?
One of the core purposes of the Public Map Platform is to map Social Places, to help us better understand the places that local children, young people, and later adults, value as social spaces, and where they feel social space needs to be improved. This information is rarely available to those who make decisions – local councils, planners, and so on – and the PMP ‘social layer’ will be a valuable resource for them. But it will also be a valuable resource for local people themselves – and to some extent the social mapping layer represents an experiment in how the public can take ownership of the local mapping, and potentially, the decision-making process.
How are we mapping social places?
Our team of mappers are currently constructing the ‘Social Mapping Layer’ of the PMP with children and young people across Anglesey. Working at first in local schools, they have been running a series of workshops with children to better understand, using various creative and mapping-based methods, how they use places socially, and how these can be mapped.
In the first workshop, children are making ‘imaginative’ maps of their local place. We have often found in previous research that for children, it helps to start with thinking about the places they visit frequently, where they like going, and to draw these in an imaginative and fun way, rather than start straight away with a standardised, top-down map. This allows the children to start thinking about the places they like, how they get between places, and what they do in them, and to share these ideas with their class. This is one example of how a child in a previous project drew their ‘imaginative map’:
After this, we then bring in ‘real maps’ of children’s locality or neighbourhood. We often use large-scale paper maps – e.g. A0 in size – for a group of children to work on. Using these maps, we ask children to find their home and school, and then we begin to map ‘social places’ onto it. Again, this is a creative exercise – we use a series of stickers which children can place freely on the map to indicate what places they like and how they use places socially, i.e. place to play, socialise, meet family, speak Welsh, enjoy natural spaces, travel between places, and so on (see figure 2 below). But children can also draw, scribble, put post-it-notes – really do anything on the map – it’s their map after all. The idea is that children can freely express how they feel about places, and the map acts as a talking point to explore how children feel and act in places socially.
In the next session, the children or young people design a ‘neighbourhood walk’ which takes them to places they have identified as important to them. This walk can be treated in different ways – as a way of talking about specific places whilst there (rather than thinking about them at a distance), which can bring up different ideas and experiences. It can be recorded through pictures or video, to be reflected on later in class. Or children can treat it like an exercise in being an ‘urban planner’ or ‘urban designer’ for a day, where they evaluate each place for its amenability and functionality for different age groups, for instance. We are using the free online tool ‘Kobo survey’ (https://www.kobotoolbox.org) as a way for children to record their experiences and geolocate these to place – to be mapped later.
In our final session, we have taken two different approaches depending on the outcomes generated in earlier workshops or the specific cohort of children we engaged with. In one approach, children and young people come back together (i.e. in the classroom) to re-map their neighbourhood, locality, or even the wider island of Anglesey using an online digital mapping tool. For this, we use uMap (https://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en), a free online digital platform that allows anyone to create a bespoke map of an area.
We ask the children to work in small groups to create their own maps, drawing on everything they have learnt from the previous three sessions. The advantage of this technique is that participants can interact with the map in flexible ways – zooming in and out, finding specific points both within and outside of their neighbourhood, and sharing these maps with their classmates. It is a powerful method for quickly generating a shared understanding of how we use social spaces, and it allows children to precisely indicate places they like, and areas they would like to see improved.
In the second approach, we ask children to make a priority list of areas they would like to see improved in their local environment. For this, we print the photographs taken by the children or our team of mappers during the neighbourhood walk. Working in pairs, the children use a worksheet to identify the places most in need of improvement and those needing the least. Following this, children draw pictures illustrating the changes they would like to see in those areas. Too often, children’s ideas gain traction only when they align with adult agendas and priorities. This approach helps identify what matters most to children and young people themselves.
These activities help engage children and young people in meaningful conversations about the community they live in. Teachers involved in our previous projects have spoken about the value of integrating these exercises in teaching and learning. In our next blog post, we will explore several ways teachers can use these activities in both formal and non-formal educational settings.
If you would like to learn more about social mapping in Public Map Platform, please contact us and reference this article.