Child- and youth-friendly cities: How does and can crowdmapping support their development?

Abstract

To develop child- and youth-friendly cities, data on infrastructure relevant for this subgroup of society is an important asset. The data can be obtained by crowdmapping approaches like OpenStreetMap (OSM). Even though OSM is used for many purposes, the question is whether it is a valuable source of data on child- and youth-relevant urban infrastructure. And, if so, how OSM can support the call for child- and youth-friendly cities. This was examined in the Austrian city of Salzburg. Based on a specially created list of urban features, OSM was analyzed for tags that would be useful to describe the relevant elements and for data available on these elements. The results show that tags exist to describe the majority (80%) of the about 40 element types identified. Although OSM holds abundant data on the elements, data gaps exist. Comparing the OSM data to Open Government Data (OGD) revealed that both OSM and OGD, together deliver a more complete picture of the relevant elements. To increase young people’s contributions to OSM and to make better use of the potential of OSM (e.g. availability of child- and youth-specific information) the following measures are needed: increase OSM’s publicity, address their motivation to add data, support them in mapping, and build their spatial literacy skills.