With your help, Green Map is:
Recovery: While the Pandemic has brought new uncertainties for everyone, we have worked to help illuminate the path forward. The Recovery Icons are being introduced to highlight public health, recuperation and regeneration - see them on our Instagram or our website, along with examples that could inspire you to create a new community resource, artwork, social media or map!
Technology: Yes, this set is available on OGM2, our new mapping platform in progress, and can be used alongside other icon sets there, including the UN 2030 Goals, as seen at Browse. Along with our partners at the GIS Collective, we’ve started hosting demos to supplement the video and text tutorials posted on new.opengreenmap.org - see Twitter.com/greenmap for updates or email us to join. Capable of mapping points, lines and areas and displaying unique icon sets and basemaps, demonstrations of this open source platform have become iterative parts of the development process.
Exhibit: “How Green Is My City” is opening soon! The Museum of Reclaimed Urban Spaces in Manhattan’s East Village is hosting a historical overview of our maps and other projects for the rest of 2020! Programming involves a mix of online events, outdoor tours and open hours - all to be confirmed around Labor Day and posted at GreenMap.org/2020exhibit and MoRUSnyc.org. We’ll send you details then too, so you can join in.
Collaboration: Green Map will continue this fall as a community member of the NEW INC. incubator! Locally, we’re taking part in the new Loisaida Open Streets Community Coalition, creating new ways to use our public space during the health crisis (and we hope, it will extend beyond the current patchwork as the city addresses the Climate Emergency it declared last year). Check out the beautiful education resources made by Newtown Creek Alliance using our icons!
“The Green Map icons made our final product beautiful, truly unique, far more intuitive, and that much easier to use!” said Ms. Bloodgood in eSpatially’s article.
Our director has also been on Instagram Live and has permission to use the image below - listen in anytime.
Green Map is a resource for every community. Use it to help your place and its people thrive! Thank you for your support of this vital work, and have a safe, sustainable summer!
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In this time of this pandemic, we know it’s important to do more than wish that all are safe and well. With everything so uncertain, here at Green Map, we are re-framing what we have learned by sharing symbols that help people visualize and create a healthier future. Borrowing from our lexicon, we are testing out a concise set of Recovery Icons designed to help communities ‘re-localize’ and inclusively regain their footing. See and comment on the draft set of symbols that promotes regeneration of the local culture at http://GreenMap.org/RecoveryIcons.
These open source Recovery Icons can be used on maps, apps and social media as well as on signage, guides, murals and as place markers. We plan to make the Recovery Icons available on OGM2, our mapping platform in development at new.opengreenmap.org, where people can quickly make informative, responsive maps of their own community’s recovery resources (our thanks to the team at GIS Collective!). We’ll share examples to inspire people, partner to extend the practice and track the ways these icons spur communications on sustainable living and calls to action, ideally with your support.
We’re also hearing from Green Mapmakers who are already using the maps and data they have collected to help their communities address immediate needs in the COVID crisis. In Washington State, Ms. Hunt’s FEED Jefferson County Green Map does the essential work of helping local farmers get their crops to people in need and to new customers. In Cuba, the network is making use of maps they created to highlight vulnerabilities as virus-related shortages are beginning to impact communities. We’re continuing to work with university students (check out the great outcomes at UVictoria this semester). We are trying to help in other ways, locally, whether it’s delivering mask-making materials we had collected from Materials for the Arts (a terrific NYC re-use warehouse), or continuing our street tree campaign - work that is more important than ever as researchers are showing how dirty air causes more COVID deaths, and the trees are a lasting defense.
Saving the best news for last - congratulations to assistant professor Murayama at the Department of Environmental Science of Azabu University in Japan. His students are winners in final round of the "University SDGs Action! Awards 2020" for their work to support the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals - check out their winning presentation in our blog!
We appreciate all the support and encouragement you have given to Green Map’s projects around the world. We couldn’t do it without you! Feel free to pitch in anytime, of course. And, just to mention, all next week, April 20-24th, our NYC Green Map + Climate Action project has a 50% match here at GlobalGiving, aligned with Earth Day.
In closing, be well, stay safe and stay active!
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For me, as Green Map’s director, each year has been so different that it’s really fun to reflect back.
For example, 2018 was our year of going open, culminating in a party that shepherded in a wonderful year of new possibilities, partners and collaborations. In 2019 this led us to join an incubator! Since September, Green Map System has been a member of NEW INC's Ideas for the City group. It's been great to work in this creative collaboration space next to the NEW Museum with 100 participants and ample opportunities to connect in new ways.
2019 has also been a year of relocalizing. I got involved in the effort to save East River Park, a site that’s been featured on many of our Green Maps, cycling and walking tours. Along with neighbors, we joined hands with East River Park Action when the East Side Coastal Resilience plan misplaced its ecological foundations and became a monolithic $1.45 billion flood wall. Gaining new skills for addressing policy that reflects the uncertainty baked into climate change, I sought a positive outcome and campaigned for street trees. The first of the 1,000 new Lower East Side Community Canopy trees are being planted now. I’m on the new street tree task force and will also take part in stewardship and leafy green regeneration of, for and by the community. There’s other local ‘placemaking’ underway and 2020 looks to be an outstanding year for progress on long-term local projects.
What about mapping? In NYC, we took on rising temperatures, a growing threat in far too many cities. We published the Refresh LES Green Map highlighting healthy, free and cool places in our community. It’s our first open map, meaning anyone can use its contents to share the 'cool mapping' concept in their own way - that’s how the Spanish version was made. We enjoyed presented it and our other work at the mapping conferences, FOSS4G, Terrifica and NYC Conservation GIS Day; at workshops on Governors Island and in Hudson NY; at Earth Celebration and EcoTrippin events; as well as at the School of Data, and in various classrooms and halls in local universities and high schools.
Yes, our global archive is still growing! Printed editions of Green Maps were produced from Baltimore and Monroe Michigan to Cape Town and Shanghai. We’re excited about the newly opened eco center in Holguin. It's the town where Green Map - Mapa Verde took root in Cuba, and now has an even stronger base from which to grow. New projects are in the works, near and far, including the development of our next mapping platform by Bogdan Szabo and Ciprian Samoila. Our interest in the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals keeps expanding, as well, with our successful fall ‘SDGs in the Park’ event, leading us forward on a new project for this spring. Follow Green Map on Facebook and Twitter for updates all year.
Special thanks to everyone for their help this year, especially our wonderful and hard-working board of directors, who took part in April’s Climate Action crowdfunding campaign in support of our NYC work. Our global efforts received a major boost from the generous folks at NYC Whisky, which matched and donated the funds raised at their 10th anniversary celebration to our nonprofit in November. We’d also like to thank you and all the donors who pitched in to this long-running global campaign on Giving Tuesday, all of which was proportionately matched by Global Giving! Wow, do we feel appreciated!
2020 - a year when clear vision will be so badly needed - is just around the corner. Please join us in doing all you can to make it a year of inclusive progress toward community wellbeing and planetary healing.
Green Map is now a member of an incubator for ‘ideas for the city’ at NEW Inc. This year-long program brings trainings, access to resources, mentors and a great cohort of more than 100 socially-minded creatives, technologists and entrepreneurs to our table. In conjunction with the NEW Museum, New Inc. is on the Bowery, close to our East Village office in NYC.
Interestingly, the incubator is just around the corner from the spot where we helped plant the first of 1,000 new street trees on the Lower East Side! You may recall that our director brought forward the LES Community Tree Canopy concept in Februrary. Now the first two trees are in the ground, planted with Parks Deputy Commissioner Kavanagh and tree advocates during our event on Sept 26, 2019 (see below). Like these first two trees, many of these will be native species which are better adapted to this climate and ecosystem. More will be planted as it gets cooler and our director has been asked to join the task force around stewardship for this Canopy. With trees being so beneficial to wellbeing across the board, we are also working on ways to share the process with other community boards across the city, and beyond.
Global news
Our new mapping platform in progress was presented at Foss4G, the open mapping conference by our tech team, Bogdan Szabo and Ciprian Samoila as described here. Your support is key to the progress of this shared, open source platform!
There are also great new print maps to celebrate in North East Baltimore MD and in Cape Town (featuring cycling)! We publisehd a new NYC Green Map too, check out how we address Urban Heat Island effect in our own community, in an inclusive and positive way.
“A Walk in the Park - SDGs in the Real World”
We enjoyed co-hosting this exciting event with Sara D Roosevelt Park Coalition. Together we mapped 41 sites on 3 blocks that are working towards the same goals as the United Nations 2030 goals! We also shared a new vision for the Stanton Building, created by Keena Suh’s Pratt students More about the party, as seen by the SDR Park team and here, you can download the map and take your own walk in the park!
Front Page News!
Special thanks to all who contributed to our NYC Climate Action project this Spring, which is creating new models for the global movement as we serve our local community.
Yes, NYC has declared a Climate Emergency! We took part and provided testimony in the lead up to the June 26th resolution by NYC City Council. Green Map has been ‘at the table’ several times this season as important policy changes are discussed and enacted.
The first NYC Green Map funded by you and LES Ready is online at bit.ly/coolLES! Refresh LES is all about saving energy while keeping cool. We mapped all kinds of places to be comfortable and relaxed while the summer sun is baking the city. Download it today or request free print copies. In keeping with our new open source policy, we made the file available for making your own version of this highly localized map. This project was inspired by Green Map Tokyo’s original Cool Share project. We hope there are abundant social benefits from being cool together, as well as cleaner air and reduced Urban Heat Island effect.
Cape Town Green Map: Celebrating 10 years of great work!
Way back in 2009, Cape Town’s first Green Map rolled off the presses. Now the 9th edition is being readied for release and everyone is celebrating ! This terrific team has continued their news service too, and you can catch up at capetowngreenmap.co.za. They also played an important role in galvanizing the public's involvement in the city’s 2018 water crisis and can now report that drinking water reserves are 50% replenished.
June 5, World Environment Day, also marked the 10th year of Open Green Map! As noted in our recent newsletter, work continues on the new version of this social mapping platform, which will be presented at FOSS4G, the open source mapping conference in August. Our thanks to the amazing team of Ciprian Samoila and Bogdan Szabo for this work-in-progress!
We're wishing you the best for the season, and donors, yes! Good news: Global Giving has set July 18th as a great day to have your donation matched! Thank you for your support and all you do for a healthy environment and climate.
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