#reblock

AND ITS OUT TOMORROW????

How High-Tech Maps Could Help Urban Slums Plan Better Streets

Image AP Photo/Felipe Dana

In slums, buildings are often so densely packed that many are cut off from streets and pathways. This creates a literal roadblock to much-needed public resources.

It’s a serious matter. Across the global south, hundreds of millions live in slums lacking piped water, proper drainage, and sanitation—ideal breeding grounds for virus-carrying insects and other types of disease. To fight epidemics such as Zika, experts warn, living conditions for the urban poor must be improved. But to do so, many slum communities first need to open up space.

A new tool might help. Open Reblock is a free, open-source platform designed to simplify the process of thoughtfully reorganizing slum communities. Funded through OpenIDEO, it’s the product of a major research collaboration by the Santa Fe Institute, Sam Houston State University, UC Berkeley, and Shack/Slum Dwellers International, a global network of community-based organizations representing the urban poor.

The only input that’s required for Open Reblock is a good-quality map with details on each property inside a community and its access to the street network. The tool uses an algorithm to identify the least disruptive reorganization of a cluster of slum blocks so that each parcel gets access to the street—nudging this house two meters east, extending that road a few meters south. It produces a new map of this “reblocked” community, which residents can adjust to their needs and use to push local government (or other support sources) to begin construction.

“How to change the physical slum? You tap into the knowledge of the people who live in the slum,” says José Lobo, an economist and sustainability researcher with Arizona State University who has worked on the project. The tool, he says, captures that knowledge—physically, on a map—so it “can be shared, examined, revisited, and acted on while minimizing disruption.” Indeed, the philosophy behind the tool is that no one is better positioned to help plan a community than those who actually live in it and have the social knowledge to understand how people need to move around their neighborhoods.

The researchers are very clear on what the Open Reblock tool will not do: command community members to raze their houses and rearrange them into straight, neat grids. The source code favors pathways that do not get in the way of existing homes or neighborhoods fixtures, which means they sometimes turn out a bit wiggly. And the physical construction process is meant to be gradual, with community members working with government to upgrade clusters of blocks at a time.