What can a geographer do in the face of the social and environmental problems of a community? More than you think

The members of Geocomunescivil organization that has been accompanying communities throughout the country for 10 years (generating information, databases and maps on megaprojects and their possible effects in communities and territories), agree that the biggest problem in Mexico is information, its accessibility and readability.

“There is a bombardment of information that generates confusion and, sometimes, seeing everything on a map is a challenge because it ends up being very stuck in data, because unfortunately there is the reality of many territories, with many threats,” said Yannick Deniau, one of the founders of Geocomunes.

These same limitations were what led to Irving Morales, a doctor in Physics, to found Morlan, an initiative for the release, analysis and visualization of data. “When we started there was a lot of talk about the data as a new super resource, ‘the new oil’ and, like every good resource, capital appropriates it, but from our point of view You have to free it, do everyone, Then we have worked to make citizens access national data and, on the other hand, that they can generate their own databases. ”

Under this principle, they have released databases of the water system of Mexico City, the National Search Commission or the National Public Security System, so that any interested person can consult the data and develop their own analysis, maps, see systematic or patterns, among many other uses.

On the other hand, Morales presents Tracea digital tool to generate Small Data georeferenced and works from the cell phone. The user creates their own topic and categories, records points, dates, locations, descriptions; Then you can download it, share it and add it to other citizen bases, “all for the pleasure of creating collaborative and local databases.” This application has been successful in the mapping of trees in different cities of the country.

Cartography of emotions

Following the technological appearance and the development of easily accessible information systems such as Google Earth, Global Forest Watch, Open Street Maps, Street View, QGIS, Sentinel, Lansat, Voyager, among others, collaborative cartography has become a basic graphic description tool that has helped to understand and defend rivers and basins, natural areas, natural areas traditional neighborhoods and colonies, until knowing the most violent areas or ‘corpocaroterographies’. The latter is a concept developed by Geobrujasan interesting collective geographer women emerged in 2014, which fuses the data, maps, artistic expressions and the community to understand each other with the environment.

“The body is the first space we inhabit to relate, it is crossed by environmental, social, cultural, power, etc. We have impregnated all these relationships, then making corpocarographs connects us with sensitivity, with expression, with experiences, with our way of understanding and understanding the world, ”said Esperanza González Hernández, a member of Geobrujas, who affirmed that the use of digital tools has helped them understand the other side of the cartography: sensitivity, self -reflection, collaborative construction and link with people.