Open Cities is a global initiative that seeks to catalyze the creation, management and use of open data to generate innovative solutions for urban planning and resilience. Co.Mapper Tulum is the version of this initiative implemented in the city of Tulum, Mexico, in line with the GFDRR Resilient Cities Program.

GeoID is the implementing partner of Co.Mapper Tulum, within a partnership between GFDRR, HOT, the municipal government and a diverse community of partners made up of scientific and technological organizations from the region, development partners and technology companies.

Objectives

The project, which began activities in November 2021, has the following objectives:

• Create or collate and publish high-quality, up-to-date open spatial data on the built environment, critical infrastructure and natural hazard risks
• Strengthen the local capacities and institutional development needed to support the design and implementation of urban resilience interventions
• Promote interaction and feedback mechanisms to improve participatory data
• Consolidate regional networks through OpenStreetMap and open source communities, in this case the Mexican community

These objectives seek to include and engage all interested people in collaborative and territorial projects, regardless of their level of theoretical or practical knowledge, since developing and taking ownership of the skills that help the community grow is also one of the project's objectives.

Training

The call for participation was initially open to all students and faculty of the Faculty of Geography of the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico, which is also an active node of the OpenStreetMap Mexico community.

Undergraduate students and students of the specialization in Automated Cartography, Remote Sensing and GIS showed particular interest in participating. They began remote mapping and learned about data quality and advanced validation under the supervision of the implementing company, GeoID, which was born from that same community.

In addition, and with a view to the support they will be able to provide to their government in the future, two campuses of the University of Quintana Roo (Cozumel and Chetumal) and several groups of geographers from universities across the country were trained during the National Meeting of Geography Students (ENEG).

The Tulum municipal team showed great openness to integrating a community perspective into its local data system, and expressed the urgency of developing its local plans, risk atlases and Climate Action Plan, which must be based on detailed local data that did not previously exist.

Like many municipalities in the region, Tulum has limited resources, and its technical team, drawn from various departments, can learn a great deal about data management and cartography to strengthen planning and apply these practices in their work.

Methodology and implementation

Three main actions were carried out:

• qualitative community risk mapping
• accurate remote mapping of the territory
• ongoing training of municipal technical staff

For the social mapping, the 29 localities of the municipality of Tulum were grouped into 7 sectors, where territorial liaisons (community representatives) were invited to bring together groups of residents and local associations. Participants freely represented, on large printed maps, the ways climate change manifests in the spaces they use and inhabit, as well as the multidimensional impacts they experience.

Social mapping is a participatory tool for reflecting on the shared territory. It does not aim to be a faithful or exhaustive representation of reality; it is an exercise in which participants identify the problems that affect them most beyond what is visible. It provides inputs for a territorial diagnosis, makes collaboration networks visible, and becomes a space to share experiences, connect and debate, among other things. This qualitative mapping of the entire territory was digitized to serve as an input for the risk atlas.

The remote mapping lasted about 8 months and included several phases of training, validation and verification, resulting in a highly detailed map of the area.

Technical staff responsible for data management across all municipal departments were trained in person and remotely on three occasions, reinforcing and complementing their knowledge of mapping in OpenStreetMap, downloading and using its data, Open Data Kit and the essentials of QGIS.

Finally, all the information is being integrated into a free, lightweight and low-maintenance geoviewer, still being finalized, which will be made available to the municipality and possibly to the public.

Outcomes

The experience made it possible to scale this initiative to the national level, integrating its lessons into the local territorial planning improvement strategy of the Ministry of Agrarian, Territorial and Urban Development (Sedatu).

Sedatu launched a course aimed at updating around 350 municipal urban development plans or programs by the end of the current administration. The course seeks to address territorial inequalities in Mexico and make the most of investment in planning to achieve tangible results in the future, since the Ministry itself estimates that around 200 billion Mexican pesos are lost every year due to a lack of territorial planning.

A MOOC was created to train and support Mexico's 2,471 municipalities in developing or reviewing their local plans, with the participation of the LAC Hub. We integrated detailed OpenStreetMap, Open Data Kit and QGIS courses into the MOOC, and we are beginning to provide tailored support to some 30 municipalities until their plans are published.

Project closure

In April 2023, several activities were held to close the project. The main one took place on Monday the 17th, at an event at the municipal government offices.

The event was attended by representatives of @CoMapper, @Geoid_mx and the Government of Tulum, Quintana Roo @Ayto_Tulum. A year of work was presented, along with an introduction and training on the platform that cross-references the local data generated with OpenStreetMap data. This platform is called Gtool and was developed by @CoMapper as an outcome of the Open Cities Mexico project.

The closing of the Open Cities Mexico project also included the participation of Fabrizio Scrollini, Director of the Open Mapping Hub Latin America and the Caribbean; Peter Masters, Head of Communities at the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team; and Celine Jacquin, Project Manager of the Open Mapping Hub.

Going forward, a support channel will remain in place to learn about how the municipal government is using the platform and any obstacles it faces, and to ensure that participatory data is integrated into government instruments such as the Local Risk Atlas.