The City is concerned to create a welcoming environment for workers, visitors - and residents - to revive its economy and maintain international competitiveness in the longer term. Supporting informal exploration through Footways linked to places of interest could both complement and promote more formal offerings, supporting recovery by discovery.
Context
The Footways project is collaborating with Exploring EC1 where City resident David Wilcox has been investigating“how maps, apps and stories can help residents, businesses and visitors explore and engage with the past, present and future of Farringdon and Clerkenwell”. That exploration - with David’s past work - has yielded demonstration maps using Esri, Google MyMaps, Maphub and Humap. Footways has developed inspiring examples of Footways routes with Google Mymaps.
We want to collaborate more widely in exploring:
ways in which the already-mapped City Footways routes can be featured online with associated places of interest. How can we use mapping platform like those mentioned, and/or collaborate with app developers? How do we research and share content about places?
how to enable and promote ad hoc quiet route options through apps - e.g. what’s the quietest and most interesting route from my location to a destination. Could these options feature in location maps for venues … how to get to us by the quietest route?
how can we generally support informal exploration of streets and places, and engagement with places and events. What can be done using existing mapping platforms? What apps are there that enable this?
What we have found about walks, trails and offers
There are a lot of walks and trails for specific routes in the City, created by the Corporation and independent guides and publishers. However, there is no one place online to find them, and they don’t link. There is no common format or source for content about places. That makes things difficult both for users and developers. More here: +City walks and trails .
There is also a Square Smile campaign to“Ensure the Square Mile is the world’s most innovative, inclusive and sustainable eco-system, an attractive place to invest, work, live and visit.” Bookmarks here. Again there is a lot of content, but it takes quite a lot of exporation via web links to find what might interest you. The City is shortly launching a #inthecityapp which may well bring things together. The promise is“Packed full of exclusive offers, itineraries and events the City BIDs and Partnerships, with support from the City of London Corporation, is bringing you a new way to discover the Square Mile”.
In summary it strikes me that:
Formally: the #SquareSmile campaign and other listings provide an enormous amount of information - and there’s lots more on Time Out, Londonist and other sites. There are also many newsletters. It takes some dedication to find what’s going on where - although the new app could help organise. The challenge is there’s so much that the City can offer - so providing navigation and engagement for a wide range of interests is going to be difficult.
Informally: again, there’s lots of information and fascinating stories in the printed and online offers from the City. However, it is very scattered, and in different formats. The challenge is that everyone will have a differentset of interests and requirements.
The #SquareSmile toolkit emphasises the importance of creating a sense of ownership and belonging to the City; reconnecting inside and(mostly) outside the officer; recalling and creating new memories; making new discoveries. Enabling more exploration and engagement through streets and common spaces could play an important part in this.
What we found about mapping platforms
Each of the possible mapping platforms and apps that we have investigated inevitably has pros and cons for our purpose. More will be available at +Footways mapping platforms. In summary:
Google Mymaps are widely used. They are free, easy to use and create, and can draw on an emormous amount of Google data and content on main Google maps and Streetview. They offer online step-by-step directions, and options for routes. However, maps will include a lot of additional content that may not be relevant - and so can look cluttered. Other platforms offer more options in displaying marker content. Text content can be added from a spreadsheet, but images have to be added manually. Revisions involve manually editing or deleting and replace spredsheet content.
Maphub provides an alternative to Google Mymaps. There is a basic free offer. Marker content is better displayed than in Google maps, and it is possible to create“cleaner” maps. There is an API, and for those with the technical knowledge it is possible to update content, including image, from a spreadsheet dynamically.
Context
What we aim to do
What we have found about walks, trails and offers
What we found about mapping platforms