Tonight I’ll be joining Nicolas Fonty of JustMap at City Hall to explore further with Deputy Mayor Matthew Ryder QC how a combination of network and geographic mapping can build connections. We first ran a workshop with Matthew in February, and were encouraged by his interest.
This time we are supporting the campaign Reclaim Our Spaces, which is building a network of grassroots groups to protect London’s community spaces. As their manifesto says:
By community spaces, we include community centres, music venues, libraries, pubs, open spaces and public spaces, youth centres, land for community food growing and street markets. Many community spaces across London have been lost in recent years and others are under threat of closure through a combination of austerity, privatisation and development pressure.
RoS has three main areas of activity:
Designing grassroots activities (e.g. “learning journeys”) enabling us to reach out to the many current campaigns in London and raising their visibility through tools such as the creation of a digital platform.
Supporting each other as a network of communities and community spaces, through sharing information, joint initiatives and practical solidarity.
Influencing the London Plan, and other strategies of the Mayor of London
Nicolas been working with RoS and Justspace to run collaborative workshops where Londoners can use their local knowledge to map places under threat, and also assets in their area.
I’m reporting the work that Drew Mackie and I have been doing to show how network mapping can build connections at the level of friends and family, neighbourhoods and across London. Here’s our poster
We believe that using a mix of traditional and digital methods to help people connect is important both for campaigns and community building.
Next week I and others will be pitching at an RSA Ideas event. There we’ll explain how we’ve been working with the Our Way Ahead initiative to map London networks.
Our idea is that we should run a participatory process to co-design the way in which different levels of networks can join up with the proposed London hub. Background here and more in a further post.