A collaborative platform allows residents of Buenos Aires villas to report problems and monitor the urbanization process

Until seven years ago, when a resident of a village in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (CABA) called 147 to report an irregularity in his neighborhood, they did not take his claim because the telephone operator could not georeference the house. As the system did not support the address, your call could not be taken into account.

Although one in ten people in the City lives in informal villages and settlements, these territories were shown as empty spaces or spots on official maps, that is, the neighborhoods, their inhabitants and the violations of rights that are lived there were invisible. In response to the need to recognize these territories as part of the City and to make visible the serious deficits in the provision of public services and urban infrastructure, the Civil Association for Equality and Justice (ACIJ) and the Wingu organization — which brings innovative technological developments to social initiatives — were allied to come up with a solution together.

“The first thing that occurred to us was to put together a '147 villero'. That is, an emergency reporting system so that residents of the villages could file complaints for the lack of provision of public services”, says Rosario Fassina, coordinator of the Area of Right to the City at ACIJ.

After a process that took several months, in 2014 Caminos de la Villa (caminosdelavilla.org) was launched, a digital platform for citizen participation and community monitoring in villages and informal settlements in the City of Buenos Aires. The initiative contributed to the democratization and appropriation of new tools for citizen participation by the inhabitants of popular neighborhoods.

To define the format of Caminos de la Villa, ACIJ and Wingu were inspired by other experiences. “We are looking for initiatives that used cartography to make inequality visible,” says Fassina. In Nairobi, Kenya, a group of young people created a free and open digital map for the community of Kibera, a village in that city. Thus, Map Kibera emerged as an interactive community information project. “With them we coordinated a virtual meeting and wrote to each other a lot by email to learn about their process. Two years later, we met them at a face-to-face event,” says the ACIJ referent. Another experience that inspired the project was Fix My Street, a collaborative platform where people in London can upload complaints related to public road infrastructure.

“The first thing we had to look for to design the platform was maps. There we encountered an obstacle: we couldn't get them. We made requests for public information and spoke with government referents, but there was no case. Finally, we got some paper maps from previous years. We realized that the best thing was to generate the cartographies of the towns in CABA”, says Fassina.

At the local level, there were meetings with Barrial Urbanism Workshops (Peat). This group holds a workshop called Architecture and Maps in Villa 31, in which, using different registration and representation techniques linked to art, architecture, photography, a series of drawings, models and sketches were made on the map of the neighborhood. “They had a lot of information and experience about the use of social mapping. We got together with them to learn the process of Villa 31″, says the coordinator.

Prior to the launch of the map, TECHO — which works on access to housing in urban settlements — had begun with the first experiences of surveying popular neighborhoods. Then, links were also made with that organization to take advantage of that experience.

It was decided to start a pilot test in four villages: Los Piletones, Ramón Carrillo, Villa 20 and 21-24. “We went out to map with a sports GPS and digitized it with OpenStreetMap, a platform that allows the collaborative construction of maps. Then, we pass that information to the web platform, which we call Caminos de la Villa. The whole process took about 10 months of work,” adds the ACIJ referent.

After the first version of Caminos de la Villa, the construction of digital maps of 16 towns and settlements in the City was achieved in which it was possible to georeference problems related to the provision of public services. Based on the complaint, the neighbors were given concrete information on how to move forward. In a second phase, they also sought to add to the mapping improvements that were achieved in the neighborhoods.

“The whole project was thought out in conjunction with the neighbors of the villas. We formed a work table, where they discussed everything from the color range of the site or the name of the project to its functionality. It was a very enriching work of collective construction”, says Fassina. For neighbors to use the platform, workshops and trainings were held.

“We realized that having the maps of the villas was very important for the neighbors. Some lived there more than 20 years ago and had never seen a map of their neighborhood. Another impact of the project occurred in the Playón de Chacarita. The neighbors asked us if we could print the map because they saw that the truck that did the sewer cleaning was not making the route it had to do and, therefore, the sewers were collapsing. At that time they made a complaint to the Social Intervention Management Unit (UGIS) and from there they had replied that they had no way of checking whether the correct itinerary was made. For this reason, the neighbors drew on the map the route that the truck was making and thus managed to solve that problem”, says Fassina.

After the launch of the first version of the platform, various advocacy actions were carried out that led to the incorporation of the villas into the official maps of the City. After many meetings, this came to fruition in 2015.

In 2016, the Government of the City of Buenos Aires announced the urbanization process in four villages, which implied a change of scenery in public policies aimed at these territories. Taking into account the new challenges, an adaptation of Caminos de la Villa was made to facilitate participation and monitor that the socio-urban integration processes in Villa 31, Villa 20, Rodrigo Bueno and Playón de Chacarita are effectively carried out.

“We were modifying the platform according to the needs that were generated. At that time, the most important thing was to monitor urbanization processes. The option of georeferencing problems is still available, but we have incorporated this new function”, says the ACIJ referent.

The progress of urbanization is measured on the map with the parameters of the Agreement for the Urbanization of Villas. It is an initiative that includes social organizations, NGOs, public and academic institutions, referents and neighbors, with the aim of achieving a broad consensus on the need to develop the villages and the conditions in which these processes must be carried out.

“Today we continue to have problems with the availability of information on urbanization. They are opaque processes regarding how much was spent, how and to whom the works are awarded. While we cannot deny the progress, we see that there are still many people who are still without drinking water, without access to safe electricity and without plumbing,” says Fassina.

Be on the map

In 2017, a new phase began with Google. The technology company lent the equipment to incorporate the images of the villas into Google Street View. Neighbors were trained to do this process.

Marcos Chinchilla was one of the inhabitants of Villa 20 who participated in the survey for Google. “We put on our backpack with the cameras they gave us and went around the neighborhood. We go through all the corridors,” says this neighbor, who is a health promoter in the neighborhood.

For Marcos, it was important to participate in the survey because he felt that it was a project that made visible to the people who live in the villas. “We were able to show the neighborhood, the houses and the streets,” he says.

In 2020, a new Caminos de la Villa platform was developed that allowed to identify and add on the map of each neighborhood both points with specific problems and places useful in the context of the health emergency. This new version facilitates the visualization of relevant data on the progress of COVID-19 cases in the cities of the City.

Looking ahead, Fassina reflects: “I hope that Caminos de la Villa will continue to adapt to different contexts to provide information. It is a tool that has to be available to the needs of neighbors.”

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This note is part of the Solutions for Latin America platform, an alliance between INFOBAE and RED/ACTION.