Living Dunbar

Introduction

We are currently applying for funding to set up a community mapping service to provide a powerful tool for community planning, engagement and understanding as we move to a low carbon future. This service will use GIS technology and internet resources to allow community groups to produce and update maps at appropriate scales and with different layers to record and plan things such as transport links, land use and food production, energy use and supply and so on.

We intend to use local maps:

• to understand and communicate energy use and renewable uptake at street-by-street that is aimed directly at reducing carbon footprints
• to provide integrated transport, cycling and walking maps to reduce car use
• to improve knowledge of local food sources and producers that should reduce food transport impacts.

Climate change will bring changes to our landscape and coast, so capturing some of that change will be important for our community's long term self-awareness.

Tools

Our local situation, between coastal, town and semi-rural geography means that other available mapping resources will not provide the detail required at a cost that is affordable. By adding to our community map themselves, local people can provide that level of detail that is missing, while having a real stake in the quality of the map.

In addition to detail, we want to be free to publish maps for many different uses, including leaflets, campaigns, reports, web sites without worrying about licensing costs.

The UK's chief mapping resource Ordnance Survey has special teams to work with the military, government, businesses, schools and leisure users, but noone to work with community groups!

Below are examples based on Dunbar produced using the Ordnance Survey, Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth toolkits. Click, scroll and drag around to see the detail that can be produced online ... but you can't print these off to use in a leaflet, or use online advertising to support your tools. Hence the need for a local mapping facility.

How to...

There are lots of online tools to mark out locations or routes or locations online but we are often restricted on what we can do with them afterwards. We can download the data and store it somewhere so we keep and share the knowledge,

We can use tools like our our fruit tree map on Google Maps or the Ordnance Survey These tools make it easy to collect annotated coordinates - blackberries can be found at <georss:point>55.993484 -2.518058</georss:point>. A set of coordinates with annotations go together to form a layer of information that can be shown on map. The coordinates can be stored in a database for later use. These coordinates, annotations and related information (photographs, for example) can then be used to produce maps using free tools like OpenStreetMap

That's it - welcome to the world of Neogeography!

Where to...

We're trying to get funding from the Climate Challenge Fund to set up the community mapping facility that will host the computers, databases and websites as well as printers (!) that enable these tools.

Soon we will be in a position where local maps will be constructed to support the effort to measure energy use at the street level, change domestic and business energy sources from fossil-fuel to renewable and to highlight the availability of local food sources, or the impacts on our coastal areas.

We also understand the value in developing a model for other communities with similar geographies throughout Scotland aiming to understand and reduce their carbon footprint and by being transparent we hope to learn from and maybe teach other groups trying to do the same.