CASA Seminar: Community mapping & VGI: gathering young people’s perspectives on their urban spaces
Volunteered geographic information (VGI) is provided as locational points data, featuring attributes and metadata. VGI can be an excellent resource for research into people’s relationships with certain places – but researchers need to understand how to make good use of its data. Making use of VGI for research involves methods for relating data to characteristics of urban contexts in which the data were gathered. These can relate to all manner of spatial characteristics, including road layout, physical landscape, demographic or environmental profiles, and so on. This presentation will introduce a case study of research based on participatory VGI with young people in contrasting urban contexts. It will show how a range of analytical methods can help to put data derived from VGI into its urban spatial context. The aim is to demonstrate the value of participatory VGI for social and spatial research.
Jamie O'Brien
Hon. Research Associate
UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis
Dr Jamie O’Brien is Research Associate (Hon.) at Liverpool University’s Geographic Data Science Laboratory, and a senior consultant at URBED Ltd. He was Senior Research Associate at CASA on the Leverhulme Trust project ‘Visualizing Community Inequalities’ (2014-2017). Jamie holds an EPSRC engineering doctorate from UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture, and his current research relates to VGI for community planning and design projects. In his roles in industry, Jamie is consultant on BEIS-funded decarbonization project with URBED and Carbon Coop, ‘People Powered Retrofit’. He is senior consultant to City of London’s ‘Central London Forward’ committee on social and spatial deprivations. Jamie is Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.