Po Ve Sham - Muki Haklay’s personal blog

As part of the Mapping Change for Sustainable Communities, we are organising a one day seminar titled ‘Mapping for Sustainable Communities - An interactive day of reports and discussion for community practitioners, academics and community groups‘.

This event is scheduled for 17th June 2008, starting at 10.30 and finishing with a reception around 7.00 in the evening. It is free and open to anyone with interest in community mapping.

This is how we describe the event:

The seminar will consider recent work and ways forward. It is being organised by University College London and the London 21 network as part of their ‘Mapping Change for Sustainable Communities’ project funded under the UrbanBuzz programme and their Environmental Justice programme. These projects use internet-based and paper mapping along with other tools to work with communities on collecting and collating local information.

The seminar will bring together academics, practitioners and community groups to discuss the use of mapping as a means of engagement and tool for collaborative action, and to consider the benefits and limitations. The seminar includes sessions for academics and practitioners and a celebration of community work.

Outline Agenda
10.30 am “Academic” Session - Theory & Research

• The use of different methodologies in participatory mapping
• Mapping, impacts and inequalities
• Panel discussion: the balance between participation and the use of technology

2pm “Practitioners” Session - The Practice of participatory mapping

• The use of mapping with local communities
• Mapping, empowerment and Community Development
• Local Government, Regeneration and the use of community mapping
• Practical workshop: starting a participatory mapping project

4.30pm “Community” Showcase - work in progress

• A brief introduction to the development of the two projects, followed by presentations about the five case studies.

6pm Reception

Now, just because a session is tagged as academic, practitioners or community, it doesn’t mean that we want just one group - the whole point is to have people from different groups joining the discussion throughout the day. The titles are about the ‘hats’ that you put on during a session!

The conference is free but numbers are limited. Register on-line at http://www.communitymaps.london21.org/includes/mcsc_conference.php

Below you can find the presentation that I gave at the Open Knowledge Conference on 15th March. The presentation focuses on the issue of environmental information and Open Knowledge and covers several areas of open information and access to environmental information, starting with a short overview of the background, followed by some examples of environmental information over the internet from the past 14 years. It continues with a few examples of recent development and a discussion of the work that we’ve been carrying out at UCL recently. Finally, there are observations on access to information in the environmental field. The presentation contains notes that explain each of the slides – for a version with the notes, click here.

One interesting observation from the discussions during the conference was that the discourse of Open Knowledge, which is a political discussion, is lacking in the area of political philosophy, and bringing this issue up will reveal, I suspect, inherent differences which are very significant for the substance of the licenses’ structures, software design and many other aspects in this area.

What I mean by political philosophy is that if you approach Open Knowledge from an egalitarian or altruistic approach then you would have a specific set of perceptions about what it can be used for, by whom and under which conditions, which will be very different to an approach taken by a strong techno-libertarian believer. The egalitarian approach might emphasise the fact that the use of your knowledge must be beneficial for society, and, if the data or software is used for personal benefit, then there should be some social payback. It is likely that no demands will be made restricting further use. The techno-libertarian approach will pick and choose which rights you want to protect (yours) and which you don’t (for example, those of media companies). You are likely to dictate certain conditions on the use of your data, to further your belief.

The core issue is what is the social change that you are trying to lead and what levers are you using to achieve it?

The argument against an explicit discussion of political philosophy is that it can destroy Open Knowledge projects (such as OpenStreetMap, where a whole range of underlying political philosophies can be found), but the problem is that the licensing and legal structures around them are unsatisfactory exactly because the politics remain unarticulated.

Even if in many projects the politics are hidden, I think that conferences and meetings (such as OKCon) should be the right forum to discuss these aspects.

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For a more detailed analysis of public access to environmental  information, see Haklay, M., 2003, Public Access to Environmental Information: Past, Present and Future, Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 27, 163-180
and other publications.

Early in December, the new version of the Indices of Deprivation (also known as the Index of Multiple Deprivation or IMD) was released. The first IMD was published in 2000, with a new version in 2004 which has now been updated. Created by Oxford University’s Social Disadvantage Research Centre, the indices classify each Lower-Layer Super Output Area (LSOA) in England according to the level of deprivation in multiple domains. An LSOA is an areal unit that contains on average 1500 people - a neighbourhood unit more or less.

As this is a data set widely used in many of my research projects, it was useful to analyse it and see how it changes in comparison to the previous version. There are some surprises, and, if the indices are really reflecting the changes in neighbourhood, the implication is that it is difficult to escape deprivation at the bottom of the ladder.

The IMD is very useful and has significant political implications. There are hundreds of academic articles that are based on applications of the IMD, and far more significant is the role that they play in allocating resources to local authorities through various governmental programmes such as Sure Start, which assists children in their early years, or Decent Homes, which improves the quality of the social housing stock. Of special importance are the points of 20% and 10% deprivation, as they are used widely in policy decisions. We use the IMD in the research with UnLtd to evaluate the location of projects and awardees, and in the Environmental Inequalities project with London 21 to show communities where they are positioned in the national scale.

After 7 years of use and acceptance at all levels of government in the UK (there are separate indices for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland), the creation of the new indices must have been a challenging task – a lot is at stake if a specific area moves up or down. The IMD is a league table of sorts, placing each of the LSOAs (and there are around 32,500 of them) in a position relative to others. For each LSOA that is declared as deprived, another one will move up the scale and out of the bottom 20%, which usually means fewer resources for the community. Therefore, it is interesting to analyse the changes in the 2007 edition in comparison to the 2004 one.

Although the Department of Communities and Local Government staes that:

“The Index scores from 2004 cannot be compared with those from 2007. Though the two Indices are very similar, it is not valid to compare the scores between the two time points. An area’s score is affected by the scores of every other area; so it is impossible to tell whether a change in score is a real change in the level of deprivation in an area or whether it is due to the scores of other areas going up or down.”(see this document)

While this is true for each area, it is still valid to check what is the overall pattern of movement across the whole data set. To do that, each LSOA was coded with the percentile point in the IMD 2007 to which it belongs (in each percentile point there are about 325 LSOAs) and compared to the percentile position in 2004. The gap represents the relative change in the position of the LSOA – positive change means that it is now less deprived, while a negative change means that the place is now more deprived compared to 2004.

Within the span of 3 years and due to the differences in the calculation method, it is expected that specific LSOAs will shift their place – especially when the investment that was put into them is taken into account. For the sake of the discussion, let’s assume that 5% change is not too big – although it can be significant if your LSOA belonged to the 17 percentile in 2004 and now belongs to the 22 percentile. Thus, it is worth exploring where the LSOAs that moved more than 5 percentage points are. In IMD 2007, over 25% of LSOAs have shifted more than 5 percentage points and some LSOAs have moved over 20 percentage points.

The distribution of the LSOAs that moved is shown in the chart below. Notice that, although this might look like normal distribution, actually the number of changes at the lowest percentages is not equivalent to the changes at the top of the range. It might be caused by the fact that the indices are especially designed to locate deprived areas and therefore located them accurately in 2004 and the situation haven’t shifted in 2007. The problem with this is it means that, in the periods of 2001-2 (on which IMD 2004 is based) and 2004-5 (on which IMD 2007 is based), not too many places were shifted out of deprivation, while the rest of the places happily shifted about. Is it possible that the IMD team was especially careful not to bump communities that were already included in the bottom 20%?

Another way to look at the data is of course through mapping. The following map represents the LSOAs that experienced significant change of over 5%. You can download an A2 size PDF in which it is possible to zoom to a specific area to see the changes.

While most of the changes are not in the most deprived areas, it is fascinating to see the geographical pattern of change. For example, by zooming in to London, it is easy to see that Barnet, Brent and Harrow are some of the local authorities with the biggest change downward, while Camden and Westminster have seen significant change upward. As many of the changes are in the middle range, will they have policy implications?

A final point about this analysis is that it was fairly easy run: the analysis was done in 4-5 hours, using an ageing laptop (a 4 years old IBM X31), Excel 2007 and Manifold GIS 8.0. While the cartography can be improved, the ability of modern GIS to do this type of work so quickly helps in focusing on the task, and not spending the time waiting for the GIS to process data…

As part of the Mapping Change for Sustainable Communities project, we organised the first workshop in the Royal Docks area, at the Sunborn Yacht Hotel last Saturday (27/10). The workshop was very successful and, as I usually do in these workshops, I start with ‘what mapping information can we find on the WWW about your locality’. I’ve been doing it now for about 7 or 8 years, but during the period, the Environment Agency’s Pollution Inventory maps never failed me as an example for technocratic dissemination of information which is not helping the people on the ground.

I find that, in all these workshops with people from many communities across London, very few knew about the Environment Agency information, let alone ever accessed it independently had. As the participants are usually from community or environmental interest groups, they are interested in the information – they just don’t know where to find it. I associate this lack of awareness with the fact that users find the information unfriendly and unhelpful, so there is no ‘word of mouth’ effect that leads to more use of the site. As someone in our Saturday workshop declared, ‘these maps are not written in community language or for community use’ – yet, they tick all the boxes of the Aarhus convention…

To understand what’s wrong, see the image below, which provides a view of the site on an average monitor (1024×768):

The header area is so big that all that is left is a fairly small area for the map.

Furthermore, as the full image of the page shows, the map is supposed to offer several layers of pollution data (on the right-hand side) but, as many of the layers include point data about the same site – all using the same symbols which overlap one another – the user can’t see if, in a given location, there is information from multiple categories.

The area of the map is very small (less than 400×400 pixels), and people find it very difficult to locate where they are or where the postcode is that they have selected in relation to the information on the map. Zooming in to the largest scale, or at any stage during the process, the system will run a query and provide information about the specific location only if the ‘learn more’ option is selected. Even as a more frequent user, I fail to click on this option and find the interaction with the system frustrating.

This site demonstrates that the Aarhus model of access to information, which is ‘we’ll build it and they’ll come’, is not sufficient and that a more user-centred approach is required to achieve public access to environmental information.