IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Spring 2014 - 18

VGI and self-reporting projects like Ushahidi, then
the resulting data is nothing short of astounding;
geosocial media provide, for the first time, an unrestricted insight into the lives of millions of the poorest
people on the planet.
As the rural poor, driven by globalization, flock
to cities in search of work [2], [10], urbanization has
become synonymous with slum growth [11]. Slums
emerge in developing nations as sprawling centers of
informal and unplanned infrastructure [11]. Due to
the poor infrastructure provision (e.g., housing, water,
sanitation) and limited resources, the populations of
these settlements will bear the brunt of the climatic,
economic, and social challenges of the 21st century [2],
[12]. The situation is further complicated by the inherent lack of information regarding people and infrastructure in slums due to their informal nature. Yet, if we
are to improve conditions in the 200 000 slums around
the world [10], and mitigate the impacts of significant
change, we need to better understand these informal
urban systems. Crucially, such research needs to engage
with members of each community in an open manner,
to understand the complexity of interactions between
inhabitants, resources, and the urban fabric [13].
Our hypothesis is that geosocial media has the
potential to act as a data source for models of the
urban system. Such models could be used to either
investigate ways to improve the current situation, or
quantify how the system will respond to change. The
cornerstone for this research is that many slum communities are already using VGI and social media to
capture geographical information about infrastructure
and populations in their settlements, and are openly
sharing this data on the Internet. As such our research
is currently focused on developing the methodologies
required to harness this data, and use it for urban systems analysis. This research is employing data from
two cities: Nairobi, Kenya, and Jakarta, Indonesia. In
Nairobi residents of Kibera formed the Map Kibera
project to create the first map of the slum, providing,
new and invaluable data on the location and distribution of infrastructure in the settlement [14]. Thus,
using only data provided by Map Kibera and OpenStreet Map we successfully built a spatio-topological
model of the road network for Kibera and surrounding
Nairobi. GIS network analysis techniques were then
used to optimize a road-based sanitation network for
Kibera's public latrines [15]. The novelty of this project is the ability to apply GIS techniques, commonly
used in data-rich developed nations, in a developing
nations context to help solve an engineering problem.
The next stage of this research is to interweave
situational reports on infrastructure from social

media together with urban network models. The
case study for this is Jakarta, where communities in
urban slums along riverbanks are using social media
and SMS texts to warn neighbors of rising floodwaters and failures in flood defenses. We are developing a suite of tools to capture and interpret this
data, using a sensor network paradigm to extend and
improve existing models of the river network during
flood events.
In conclusion, while there are still significant
research challenges in this emerging field, geosocial
media has the potential to provide a novel source of
data to understand complex urban systems in informal
settlements. Such understanding is key to researchers
so that they may provide tangible adaptation strategies to those on the front-line of global change.

Author Information
Tomas Holderness is a Geomatics research Fellow
at the SMArT Infrastructure Facility, University of
Wollongong, Australia. Email: tomas@uow.edu.au.

References

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[12] I. Douglas et al., "Unjust waters: Climate change, flooding, and
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IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

SprING 2014

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