tagging online maps for urban planning and design

March 18, 2009 2:20 PM

How has your organization/neighborhood/town/city/region/etc... used interactive web-based map tagging sites (ie, Google Maps, ZeeMaps)?

I am exploring the potential uses of online mapping sites for the field of urban planning/design. Looking for specific links to maps that have been created to help gather data from residents during initiatives like neighborhood planning, park redesign, infrastructure repair, etc...

For example: a map to identify locations of potholes in Cambridge, MA.

Another example: A site to map bedbug infestations around the world

These are pretty basic examples. More like them would be good. Even better would be links to maps that are connected to more extensive community planning or development process where the goal is to make it easy for residents to geographically display information they know/gather in their own neighborhoods.

I'm sure there are millions of maps out there, but they're hard to find because this is all decentralized (ie, hosted on a bajillion different sites, rather than all listed through one main site).

posted by jk252b to computers & internet (2 comments total)

it sounds like you're looking for gmaps mashups (which don't know much about) but openstreetmap.org offers exactly the sort of crowdsourcing map making that you're talking about, follows existing GIS standards and best practices, and is probably pretty extensible as well. Not as polished or complete as gmaps, but far easier to tinker with.
posted by Chris4d at 12:15 PM on March 19

I can't give you a link to this because it isn't built yet, but we are working with a major city in Europe to develop a map that displays all X existing bike racks, and lets people stick in their suggestions as to where to place the additional Y new bike racks allocated for 2009. It's just one element of the site but I think it's a nifty use of what you're talking about.

The most amazing thing to me about this project, which to be perfectly honest is in no way extraordinary, is that when I said "Dude, who is placing these X number of pins on the map? Because I can tell you, it isn't going to be me" the city came back to say that was OK, they already had a full set of GIS data and coordinates for every bike rack location. I thought that was stunningly progressive and far-sighted of them, considering they've been rolling out these racks for years. And we're talking about a lot of bike racks here.
posted by DarlingBri at 5:26 PM on March 19