Creative mapping for child-friendly planning
Children and their experiences have often been overlooked in the development of the public realm. This invisibility of children in national and local level planning results in significant constraints on their freedoms and opportunities. Finding ways of bringing children’s voices to the fore is an essential aspect of any child-friendly initiative. Creative mapping can help to highlight these neglected perspectives.
Mapping of public space also tends to focus on the quantitative categorisation of space in terms of its amount, shape, size, intended use and location. Equally important is generating insights into how people use space, what they value, and how they feel about different aspects of their environment. Creative mapping offers an opportunity for a different kind of representation through the telling of stories from those who inhabit these spaces. In doing so, creative mapping can reveal how children’s use of space is often different to what may have been expected or intended.
Creative mapping with children and families
The majority of our creative mapping research is carried out remotely. This provides greater flexibility and helps people to feel at ease as they engage online from places where they feel comfortable. Participants (in family or friendship groups) will be asked to take a journey into and around the locality of interest, following their usual routes and visiting the places that matter to them. Using the magic of mobile phones, they will be asked to track their routes and take photos of the things that matter to them. We then arrange online meetings with each group to talk about their photos and their associated experiences and views of the locality. We use this information to co-create a ‘map’ for each group of participants, illustrating and sharing their views and experiences in striking and creative ways.
We work with commissioning organisations to identify an agreed number of participants from the group of people you are interested in finding out more from. This could be a selection of different aged children, a group of people with particular protected characteristics, or families from a certain community. With this type of research, it is not the number of participants that matters so much but the level of detail and insight participants are supported to provide. It is people’s stories that can act as a powerful motivator of change.
Having engaged with the participants and co-created their maps, we carry out an analysis across those maps, identifying patterns in terms of what matters to who, where and why – both in terms of what is working well and what could be improved.This data analysis results in a written report on the thematic findings that emerge.
The co-created and artistically designed nature of these maps, when produced at scale, can be readily used to create striking and engaging displays or presentations. We can also work with you to design and facilitate follow up engagement events using the maps, be that with the public or more specific decision makers.
Costs for our creative mapping research depend on the number of participants required, the level of work involved in recruiting those participants, and the number of maps to be created. However, as a guide, the case study provided below cost approximately £10,000 for 10 maps, involving 30 participants, plus a report on the thematic findings from those maps, and the facilitation of an event presenting those maps and findings to others.
Creative mapping case study
In 2021, as part of a review of Chester’s ‘One City Plan’, Ludicology was commissioned by Cheshire West and Chester Council to gather evidence from children and their families about their views and experiences of Chester city centre. To do so we created maps with our research participants. Children and families used GPS apps to track their routes, photographing what mattered to them on their journeys, and talking through a selection of their images via online meetings; a process that worked well for a wide age range of participants from 5- to 50-year-olds. The 10 resulting maps are full of colourful images and quotes that reveal much about children’s play and their use of the city centre. See our case study for more details.
Subsequently, the maps produced formed the centre piece of a public consultation on the One City Plan engaging many adults and encouraging them to re-think children’s place in the city centre. In response Chester’s refreshed One City Plan includes ‘city experience and play’ as one of its four main themes, with support for play embedded throughout the plan, including direct quotes from our research. Read more here.
An example creative map produced with children
