OpenReblock is an interactive mapping tool to facilitate community-driven planning in slums. The tool relies on data from OpenStreetMap and interdisciplinary urban science techniques to diagnose infrastructure deficits and propose new street networks to enhance spatial accessibility and lay the groundwork for further improvements like street enumerations, clean water and sanitation infrastructure, and increased tenure security.
The initial version of the tool focuses on reblocking, which is a process of provide street access to all structures in a slum in a minimally-disruptive way and set up urban services, efficient water management, emergency assistance and all other benefits of an urban street network. The motivation behind this project is to create a web-based service for an open-source code base that includes the baseline reblocking functionality and to develop additional related planning capabilities outlined below by drawing on the talents and expertise of a broader global community of developers and subject matter experts.
The world is urbanizing quickly with nearly 4 billion people presently living in urban areas, about 1 billion of them in slums without access to plumbing, electricity, or basic city services. Rapid urbanization creates a need to rethink how urban planning happens by putting open source tools in the hands of communities to speed up the process and democratize the resources needed to inform better solutions. The current challenge -- which we are hoping you may be able to help with -- is to help develop this urban planning toolkit.
Compared to other web development frameworks R Shiny has a relatively low learning curve allowing people across a range of disciplines and skill levels to contribute, quickly iterate, and work towards a toolkit that can work at scale and across a variety of contexts. Developing a viable urban planning tool is an incredibly complex task and it will require a large, interdisciplinary community. The solution must combine knowledge of UX design, civil engineering, urban planning, architecture, earth science, GIS, social science, and mathematics. R Shiny is an excellent way for this community of students, volunteers, practitioners, and researchers across the globe to use their knowledge and expertise to build a user-friendly planning tool to empower slum-dwellers.
Open a pull request! Below we’ve developed a set of modules that focus on discrete urban planning challenges in slums and describe how one might add a feature to address the issue and incorporate it into the tool. While the initial version of OpenReblock only maps a few areas, extracts vector data, and runs a prototype version of the reblocking algorithm, the hope is to incrementally add modular features to the tool to enable slum-dwellers and urban planners to re-plan and integrate slums and informal neighborhoods in a holistic manner with minimal disturbance and cost.
Please read CONTRIBUTING.md for details on our code of conduct, and the process for submitting pull requests.
This project is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, version 3. See the LICENSE.md file for details.
©2019 University of Chicago
OpenReblock is part of the Million Neighborhoods Initiative led by Anni Beukes, a research practitioner from Slum Dwellers International (SDI), and Luís Bettencourt, a physicist. This project would not be possible without the generous support of the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation and contributions from students at the University of Chicago and cross-stakeholder conversations with Smruti Jukur, Menare Royal Mabakeng, Yohnny Raich, Killion Nyambuga, Richard Bockarie, Francis Reffell, Jose Lobo, and Megan Chapman.
This research project builds on the scientific work of Christa Brelsford, Taylor Martin, Joe Hand, and Luís Bettencourt, researchers from the Santa Fe Institute cities group and Sam Houston State University and Slum Dweller Federations. More details on the scientific methods are available in the papers: The Topology of Cities and Optimal Re-blocking as a Practical Tool for Neighborhood Development and the original OpenReblock project site.
Nicholas Marchio