Slum Residents In Kenya Map Their Homes Because Google Can't

Ten young adults who live in Mathare, a large slum in Nairobi, got a crash course last month in cartography 2.0. They learned how to use their smartphones to create a "crowdsourced map" of a slum. This is the signature initiative of Spatial Collective, a Kenyan social enterprise that creates user-generated slum maps. "Since slums are informal settlements, it's hard to know what's there and who lives there," Primož Kovacič, the founder of Spatial Collective told The Huffington Post. "Once we map its features, the government can treat a slum like any other part of a city."   It's almost impossible for traditional map providers like the government and tech companies to represent, because of their chaotic composition. Spatial Collective is one of the only groups filling that niche. Its maps have helped Nairobi slums get electricity, plumbing, emergency services, and more. It's tough for a company like Google Maps to capture the constantly changing environment of a slum. For example, if you look at the Nairobi slum called Mathare in Google Maps, it looks like a blank, undeveloped expanse. But the same area mapped by Spatial Collective, on the OpenStreetMap platform, has a detailed index of its buildings and utilities. A Google Maps spokesperson said that because slums are largely informal settlements, there are few "authoritative sources" from which it can draw data. "We show the best data we're able to obtain fro...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news