Activists have always used innovative means to campaign for political and social change. As technology has advanced, so have the methods by which citizens have organized and spoken out for social justice. With the increasing availability of geographic information system software, maptivism — which uses maps to promote a cause — has emerged as a salient way that information can be collected and presented to affect policy.
It feels fresh, but it’s not exactly new. Mapping software has been used by activists in a multitude of ways over the past 30 years: From the promotion of environmental justice in Silicon Valley during the early 1990s to the collection of public safety information in participatory mapping projects that aided pro-democracy protesters around the world in the early 2010s.
More recently, nonprofits in the Atlanta region have also engaged in maptivism. In 2016, the Atlanta Bicycle Coalition partnered with WeDemandBetter to develop the Unblock the Lane campaign. The campaign involved crowdsourcing information about vehicles stopped in bike lanes via a real-time mapping app that collected the date, time and location of each incident, all of which fed into a report presented to Atlanta City Council. By 2019, Atlanta City Council unanimously passed a law that would fine those blocking bike lanes, due in part to Atlanta Bicycle Coalition’s maptivism.
This year, PEDS (a non-profit dedicated to making streets and communities in Georgia safe, inviting, and accessible to all pedestrians) also partnered with WeDemandBetter to assist with their Clear the Clutter campaign. In January 2019, the City of Atlanta banned shareable transportation device users from blocking sidewalks with parked mobility devices. The Clear the Clutter campaign crowdsourced reports on scooter parking violations via a mapping app very similar to the Unblock the Lane campaign. By May 9, 2019, the group had collected evidence of more than 1,500 violations through the app — enough to write a report for city officials and take the app offline.
