Disruption and Design: Crowdmapping Young Women’s Experience in Cities

Abstract

The history of women's exclusion and invisibility in cities is well charted, yet young women's experience of sexual harassment and assault has been difficult to quantify. This article discusses the Free to Be project initiated by Plan International in 2018. In partnership with Monash University's XYX Lab and CrowdSpot, the crowdmapping web app enabled young women in Delhi, Kampala, Lima, Madrid, and Sydney to identify and share their experiences of public spaces. It is believed to be the most ambitious global crowdsourced data collection project on street harassment ever undertaken. By using coding and visual data techniques, the data demonstrated the scale of the problem and the urgent need for city-level decision makers, as well as other members of society, to take action. This article outlines the findings from Free to Be, and explores the ways data and activism led by girls and young women are a powerful method for creating change.

A Realist-Informed Review of Digital Empowerment Strategies for Adolescents to Improve Their Sexual and Reproductive Health and Well-being

“…We reviewed the study's characteristics, study design, digital strategies mentioned, and its main findings (See also Annex 2). Of the 26 papers, 16 are on digital strategies in LMIC [23,[33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47]. Five papers related specifically to urban settings [34,43,[48][49][50], of which one on informal settlements [42].…”

“…Three were evaluations [37,38,50], and one study was a randomized controlled trial [49]. Nine publications were qualitative research studies, including a qualitative survey [51], case studies [43][44][45], an ethnography [36], and a discourse analysis [48].…”

“…group-level change, organizational change, or change at the level of the health system or health policy [34,43,50]. In contrast, and, to an extent, the paper by Tanner addressed collective action for change [44]. In addition, in most interventions and studies, there appears to be hardly any reporting on differentiation of strategies for early, late, or middle-age adolescents, nor for young adults, despite there being differentiation of strategies in terms of gender, such as in the report of Kaleidos Research [37].…”

“…They enhance adolescents' access to information on services, directions to youth-friendly clinics, information on laws, and practices that are sociocultural taboos or are illegal in certain settings, such as abortion [53,59,60]. Second, solidarity between adolescents going through the same issues, by way of sharing of stories, dialogue, and engagement between peers seems to be a mechanism programme's aim to trigger, because this is considered to foster resilience [48], a sense of connection [34,44,48], and because of adolescents' distrust of providers and institutions in settings with a dominant conservative tradition [43].…”

uMap: A Free Open-Source Alternative to Google My Maps

“…Crowdspot is yet another crowdmapping platform, originally launched in 2015 to help the city of Melbourne become bike-friendly (Aisenberg 2016). Today, Crowdspot appears to be an interesting alternative to Ushahidi to set up crowdmapping projects (see for instance Tanner et al 2020), but it is neither open-source nor free. Other JavaScript-based webmapping libraries such as Mapbox, Leaflet, OpenLayers and even Google's Maps API have been mobilized by more tech-savvy individuals to design one-off online mapping applications with crowdmapping functions such as the Queering the Map project (LaRochelle 2020; Kirby et al 2021).…”