We were invited to organize a panel for the India Urban Conference, held in Mysore between November 17 – 20^th, and organized by the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Janaagraha, and Yale University.

The panel was supposed to be a “deep dive” session, in which panelists and audience members could engage in a deep discussion of the issues. We decided to use this as an opportunity to get other people to discuss something that we are always thinking about at Transparent Chennai – about whether the methods that we’re developing here are actually viable as a model for improving participation (and accountability) all over the country.

We wanted to start this conversation because there has been a push for greater participation in urban governance by the central government. Currently, the needs of poorer urban residents are not well reflected in the data used for policymaking, nor does the system of elected government at the city level work well in ensuring that residents’ needs are met. Space for more participation is exciting in theory because there is another opportunity to express these needs. In practice, however, participation in urban governance has been really disappointing.

With one important exception – the increase in participatory data collection. Many community groups across the country are coming together to create data that can accurately capture local conditions, provide a realistic basis for planning, and to create data that can actually hold the government accountable. Such practices have flourished recently in part because of the advent of cheap and widely available technological tools like Google Maps and OpenStreetMap.

Our panelists at the IUC were all people who had worked with urban participation, and most with participatory data collection.

Lalitha Kamath, a professor from TISS, presented a case of formal participation gone wrong: the GBWASP project in Bangalore, where formal avenues for participation failed to adequately provide an outlet for residents’ needs. Sid Hande talked about Transparent Chennai’s ward accountability experiment, in which volunteers created data about civic problems that could hold local elected representatives accountable for local improvements. Monalisa Mohanty, the director of the UDRC, showed maps created by slum-dwellers in Orissa about their own settlements, which looked vastly different from the maps created by city authorities.

Finally, Dunu Roy, of the Hazards Center in Delhi spoke about a number of instances in which groups of workers had come together to create data and maps about problems that they were facing, and used them to come up with surprising and counter-intuitive interventions. He also emphasized that community data creation needed to be combined with community data analysis, because the methods used by formal planners may not apply at the local level. He also emphasized that in many cases, the relationship between the formal city and the informal city was an antagonistic one, and that solutions espoused by workers could not be implemented because of opposition from the government or from other city residents.

So, did we get an answer to our question of whether some of the methods that we’re developing at Transparent Chennai can actually serve as a model for improving participation across the country?

Well, not quite. The kinds of initiatives that Sid, Dunu, and Monalisa discussed are resource intensive and time-intensive, and they also often depend on the existence of a partner organization or group that can help communities to create and process data. They are micro-level processes, that are difficult to scale, and that produce data that is difficult to incorporate into existing planning processes. However, they often yielded information around which communities could organize and press for changes and improvements that really reflected local needs for shelter, services, and livelihoods.

Despite such processes not yielding the kind of models and best practices currently in vogue today, participants at the panel discussion seemed to agree that these practices represent a real deepening of democratic practice. They also provide an important counter to the general discourse around planning today, which largely focuses on responding to a perceived crisis in city infrastructure, rather than responding to citizen needs.

Nithya V Raman

Transparent Chennai was recently invited to participate in the Center for Environment Education’s (CEE) annual coastal carnival for kids, which was held at the Bharat Scouts and Guide’s campus on Marina beach. Our focus? To try and provide an interactive display that in the end would highlight the importance of the beach. How did we do this? Through maps of course!

First we pinned down tiled google images of Chennai’s coastline and we asked students to answer in not more than a couple of sentences either one or all of the following questions:

After students had done this they were asked to pin their blurb on the paper map based on where they wanted it to be.

As the day progressed the display built itself and at the end we were left with a collage of blurbs pinned by the students that visited our stall. This resulted in a rich and varied perception map about the coastline.

Parallel to this, we also had students try to locate where they lived on a big map of Chennai city (using TC’s boundary data no less). What we wanted to know was how far have students traveled to be at this event?

This map also built itself as well as the day went on…

The final map looked something like this. It serves as an important indication to the importance of the coastline with students coming from as far as Thirunindravur to attend CEE’s event.

New layer coming up!

- Siddharth Hande

Following a successful partnership where we helped create data for ROB’s dustbins and toilets proposal (http://www.transparentchennai.com/2011/03/07/spatial-mapping-of-chennais-beaches-by-rob-and-transparent-chennai/) we are teaming up again! This time we will help visualize their efforts to categorize the kind of trash found in the Adyar estuary, which they are doing to get an idea of what kind of garbage finds its way there. What they hope this will do is start a bigger conversation about the responsibilities of citizens with regards to the trash they generate.  After the categorization (based on type of trash, name of the company etc) they are planning to choose one product and trace its entire life cycle (from manufacture to where it finally ends up). We are really excited because a lot of their work can be mapped and the audits, which are every Saturday at 4:30 P.M at broken bridge will be video taped with vlogs and blogposts coming out every two weeks! All of this will be featured on our website- watch this space!

Below is the first post that they have written-

Last Saturday, both veteran and first-time Reclaim Our Beach members took a trip to Broken Bridge in order to survey the garbage found around the area. The stunning views of the water on both sides – the crashing waves of the Indian Ocean to the East and the tranquil Adyar Estuary waters to the West are spoiled by the layers of trash and lack of concern for the beautiful area. That afternoon, we began our journey to learn about this garbage: what types of products are most prevalent? Which corporations are present?  How and why did the garbage end up here? The point of this audit was not to clean up all of the trash, since it was found (from past clean-up experience) that within weeks it all just piles up again. Instead, we were (and still are) determined to understand how the process of this trash works, educate people, and change how we think about consumption.

It is startling to walk around the Broken Bridge. Along the shore of the Adyar River, a haven for over 143 species of migratory and residential birds, are countless silver wrappers, soda bottles, and even chappals and clothing! There are enough plastic bottles to cease manufacturing, enough schoolbags to send more children to school, and enough thermacole to build a raft. Yet, all of this trash ends up on the marshy land, disturbing nature and tarnishing the beach.

Starting with Zone 1 (depicted in the map below), we split up into teams of two and three and got to work. One member wrote down the information as others picked up and examined the trash. There were 6 main types of trash – plastic, rubber, thermacole, aluminum, silver foil, and composite, which were then divided up into subcategories. It was important that the corporation name was recorded for each piece of trash – PepsiCo, for example, for Slice Mango Juice.

A few hours later, as the sky darkened and complaints of hunger became more frequent, we put down our pens and trash. Although there was still much garbage on the land, we had each learned more about it. We had encountered trash that was from here in Chennai, all over India, and even occasional items from Europe or Southeast Asia! When researching the items that we found, most of them were manufactured by some huge corporation: PepsiCo and Uniliver were the most recurrent, but we also found many items belonging Nestlé, Britannia, Kraft Foods, and more. The main culprits found in this area were water, juice, and soda bottles – there were over 20 different types of drinks found – and silver foil packets that once contained food. Standing out among these normal pieces of trash were some eccentric ones, such as a purse and a completely intact helmet.

As you can see in the map above, there are 11 more zones that we must inspect. With eight people, it took us two hours to do just one zone. So, we need your help! If you are interested in helping the environment, learning about consumption and waste, or looking for a fun way to spend the afternoon, stop by the broken bridge on Saturdays at 4:30 for the next couple of weeks! We would really love your help.

- Elina, a member of ROB

For me, the fact that maps are rhetorical tools became most visible during our mapping workshop in Olcott School where the kids debated constantly on what they would like on their map and how it should be represented, each debate leading to subtle changes in the maps presentation. Also, in an effort to use maps as a tool to understand how the kids viewed their surroundings beyond their school, we gave them google images of the surrounding area and asked them to take pictures and write about what they found interesting in different areas. While the best way to do this would have been to let the kids choose the areas themselves, unfortunately, because all the kids were not used to navigating using google images we familiarized them with the tool by marking places of interest and taught them to use roads and other identifiers to locate these areas. This is a quick screen capture of the areas that were marked. Placemarks marked 2 and 3 when clicked, reveal more locations.

The resulting map tells us a story, and provides insight into how these children visualize these spaces.

If the placemark is clicked, it reveals the photo that was taken and the original writing in Tamil.

Finally these maps were used to tell the children’s story in a public presentation made by the kids.

What stories will the maps made by Urur and Olcott Kuppam tell? What conversations will they start between the Kuppam, the general public and the authorities? While we can’t know for sure, we do know that the maps will help in at least ensuring that these conversations are less one sided.

- Siddharth Hande