Cities of the Future Need to Be Both Smart and Just: How We Think Open Mapping Can Help

Abstract

Along with increasing urban growth rates, especially in the global south, cities are becoming more fragile because of rapid climate change, insecurity, and increasing urban landscape challenges. With the limited budget sums, coupled with outdated and limited spatial and aspatial data, city planners, governors, and governments are left short of the optimal and efficient approaches to deploy and reckon just, smart, and sustainable cities across all populaces. This demands agile tools and applications for effective decision-making to maintain and sustainably improve quality of life with an assurance that no one is left behind. We demonstrate the potential utilization of OpenStreetMap datasets by urban planners and governing councils to enhance evidence-based planning and policy initiatives. Several projects have been pioneered and executed by youth to demonstrate their crucial role in the organization and collection of crowdsourced geospatial data as a manifestation of the broader theoretical underpinnings of urban governance encapsulated in SDG 16 – Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions and SDG 11 – Sustainable Cities and Communities. We argue youth are communicating through the collection of the data. We demonstrate practical approaches to the inclusion of OSM and the participation of local YouthMappers chapters towards objectively positive, just urban governance.