Context

Brazil’s President Lula da Silva is prioritising improvements for residents of informal settlements (periferias), which are currently home to approximately 6 million people. To achieve this, the government aims to work directly with residents to develop community-generated and validated data on the country’s more than 13,000 periferias, starting with a spatial understanding of community vulnerabilities and potentialities. To meet this need, they have launched Mapa das Periferias (MdP) to meet this need.

Housed within the Brazilian National Secretariat of Peripheries, the MdP team is partnering with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) and the Urban Big Data Centre (UBDC) at the University of Glasgow on the Mapeamento Popular campaign. This collaboration supports periferia residents in collecting the geospatial and community data required to advance formalisation processes and infrastructure upgrading.

Approach

In this coalition, HOT provides technical and methodological expertise by developing a bespoke data collection tool, Nós no Mapa, for community mappers to gather insights and communicate them with counterparts in the Ministry of Cities. Nós no Mapa, which translates simultaneously as “Us on the Map” and “Knots on the Map”, is built on open-source software projects including Field Tasking Manager (developed and maintained by HOT) and QField (developed and maintained by OpenGIS).

The tool enables thousands of community mappers to locate themselves within their neighbourhoods and easily add data relevant to their lived experiences, specifically the risks and assets they perceive, using a set of standardised questions co-developed by the MdP team and community collaborators.

From informal settlements, the data then flows into the Mapa das Periferias interactive dashboard, where it can be visualised and accessed. This data is used by the Ministry of Cities to support the development of collaborative urban projects aimed at upgrading and formalising informal neighbourhoods.

Nós no Mapa will also serve as a data source for the Wellcome Trust–funded PACHA project, led by the Urban Big Data Centre at the University of Glasgow, which focuses on geospatial data, community mapping, and climate-health issues in informal settlements across Brazil.