Civil Rights, Social Action & Advocacy

The Illinois Network of Centers for Independent Living is a statewide coalition of the 23 regional centers for independent living (CIL) that serve Illinoisans with disabilities.  CILs promote full and equal access to our communities for those residents and visitors with disabilities.  The mission of INCIL is to help these regional centers share resources and collaborate on statewide issues such as funding and advocacy.

The Megafone.net project invites "groups of people on the fringe of society to express their experiences and opinions through face-to-face meetings and mobile phones."  They've worked on some very cool projects but I'm most impressed with their urban accessibility maps (thanks to Urban Tick for the link).

The Geneva and Barcelona accessibility maps were created by giving GPS-enabled camera phones to people using wheelchairs.  Over a 6-month period, the mapmakers documented inaccessible barriers around their respective cities - each barrier was photographed and placed automatically on a mashup.  Common barriers include stairways, inaccessible curbs, escalators, broken elevators, etc.

Two prominent uses of maps as visual aids in news stories late this week - first up, the Washington Post's state-by-state map of "unauthorized immigrants as a percentage of state population."  Based on 2008 data, the map also includes a chart showing the estimated increase of this percentage in Arizona over the past 20 years.  

Maps are powerful and important!  That's the caption of a slide in my standard "GIS for nonprofits" presentation, right around the part where I'm trying to teach why nonprofit organizations should care about maps.  Maps aren't always used just to illustrate historical statistics or last year's data - they can also be used to visualize future plans and activities for our communities and our world... with both positive and negative implications.  That's why I think the Illinois Fair Map Initiative's Fair Map Amendment is such an important issue.

Zachary Johnson, the cartographer/geographer behind IndieMaps.com, wrote up a fascinating bio/review of William Bunge, a prominent social geographer from the times before mashups and slippy maps.  The images in this post are excerpted from the Bunge-created maps on IndieMaps.com and I believe they all first appeared in Wiliam Bunge's "Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution," 1971, Schenkman Pub. Co.