Last week residents and participants of Design4DCity came together to pilot the “mapping for change” – project run by Wendy Jo Mifsud and Antoine Zammit (Build Environment – University of Malta) and in collaboration with Valletta 2018 Foundation. The project wants to empower residents and visitors to share important information about daily challenges and opportunities in Malta’s capital city. As urban planners/designers one can have a broad idea of these issue, but only the ones living in the area can provide you with the right information. The pilot looked at possibilities/opportunties of how to engage people. The online map is very user-friendly, but we realized that for some the online tool might be a barrier, therefore it is good to have alternatives to proceed the online work, which could be a consultation session or like we did, take time to do a paper mapping first. The paper mapping focussed on pedestrian and vehicular accessibility in the Biccerija area. I had the honour to guide the paper mapping session for which I used the MAP-it tools developed by my former colleagues of the Social Spaces research group. This mapping tool can be fine-tuned to every situation. One can mix labels/text and icons to trigger discussion and ideas through simple task/questions. The results of this session where then later implemented on the online map. As such the paper session complemented perfectly the online map. But the mapping has just started. All online input is welcome to give planners and designers a beter insight of what a liveable city needs to be.
Ann Laenen 