We are very pleased to announce the winners of this year’s IDPR Early Career Best Paper Prize!
This prize is a collaboration with the International Development Planning Review journal, and we’d like to thank the editors for working with us. The prize is awarded to the best paper presented at a DevGRG sponsored session at the RGS-IBG Annual Conference. The winners will now work with the editors of the Journal, Dr Dan Hammett and Dr Glyn Williams, to develop their paper for publication followed by a standard peer review process.
This year, the editors have made a joint award to Alves et al. and Wakonyo et al. – the respective first authors are Marina Alves and Dianne Wakonyo – huge congratulations!
The papers are titled:
Alves, M., Pinto, G., Albernaz, P. ‘Exploring Opportunities for Local Populations: Mapping Industrial Remnants in Rio de Janeiro’s Railway Suburban Areas’
Wakonyo, D., Kuffer, M., Thomson, D., Wanjiru, N. ‘He Who Makes the Map Tells the Story’
The editors have also selected a ‘Highly Commended’ paper, awarded to Amrita Dasgupta for their paper titled ‘Drawing the Water-Human Relation in Ostracised Occupations of Deltaic Ecologies of the Indian Ocean’ – huge congratulations to Amrita as well!
Details of these papers can be found below
This year’s award really speaks to the excellent quality of the papers that were presented at DevGRG-sponsored RGS AC2024 sessions, and I know you’ll join me in congratulating these early career scholars for their success.
We look forward to seeing the papers in print!
Abstracts
Exploring Opportunities for Local Populations: Mapping Industrial Remnants in Rio de Janeiro’s Railway Suburban Areas
Marina Alves, Gabriele Pinto, and Paula Albernaz
Abstract: This paper introduces a collaborative digital mapping project focused on the industrial remnants in the railway suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, exploring opportunities for addressing the impacts of deindustrialization on local populations. This project is part of the LAPU (Laboratory of Urban Projects) at the Graduate Program in Urbanism (PROURB) – Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, coordinated by Prof. Dr. Maria Paula Albernaz. Starting in 1980, the economic crisis (Palma, 2014; Rodrik, 2016; Harvey, 1989), uncontrolled inflation, and external debt led to the closure of numerous factories in these suburbs of Rio, resulting in a significant decline in industrial productivity. Over the following decades, the suburban landscape underwent dramatic changes: factories were repurposed for new commercial uses (Schindler et al., 2020), replaced by vertical condominiums, or occupied informally, contributing to the expansion of favelas in the region. The development of new housing projects often failed to meet the needs of the working class, further deepening social and spatial segregation (Caldeira, 1997). At a theoretical level, this paper engages with the question posed by Brazilian geographer Milton Santos (1996) regarding whether these urban forms – marked by their size and historical significance – can foster urban transformation through social action. Empirically, we showcase significant examples of these former industrial spaces that have either been incorporated into the formal city by the real estate sector or have been informally appropriated. Our aim is to uncover the underexplored dimensions of suburban production, logic, and modes of existence that have led to segregation, contradiction, and new entanglements, exploring the interplay between the social and spacial realms, as well as the materiality and practices associated with these spaces.
He Who Makes the Map Tells the Story
Dianne Wakonyo, Monika Kuffer, Dana Thomson, Nicera Wanjiru
Abstract: Traditional cartographic practice creates inequality between those who map and those who are mapped, with the latter having little say, if any, on what is worth documenting and what is not. If places are mapped, what is generally missing are the assets of communities. In the case of informal settlements, this asymmetry has an additional layer of who has access to mapped data and therefore makes use of it. The CommunityMappers initiative aims to challenge this epistemic injustice by equipping community members with mapping and data collection skills, consequently breaking down the obstacles that communities in informal settlements would have in developing their own mapping agenda, carrying out mapping exercises and using the data gathered to better advocate for the needs of the community. This paper examines how traditional mapping practices have contributed to power imbalances between formal mappers and informal communities, and investigates the potential of participatory mapping initiatives to mitigate these disparities. It aims to answer the following questions: (1) How does traditional mapping practice contribute to power imbalances between those who map and those who are mapped, particularly in informal settlements? (2) How can participatory mapping initiatives, such as CommunityMappers, enhance the influence and participation of marginalised communities in urban planning and policymaking? (3) What are the challenges and opportunities of community-led mapping in informal settlements, and how can these initiatives be made more sustainable and impactful? The study used a mixed-methods approach, and drew on participatory action research that focused on informal settlements in Kenya and Nigeria. The methodology included co-designing a community data collection curriculum with community members, providing training in data collection and analysis, and evaluating the effectiveness of community-generated maps in influencing policy. The findings suggest that community-led mapping strengthens community agency by enabling residents to identify and prioritise their concerns, gather data, and advocate for their neighbourhoods. The CommunityMappers methodology confronts epistemic injustice by recognising and incorporating community-held knowledge, enhancing data literacy skills, and amplifying community voices in advocacy initiatives. While community-led mapping offers significant benefits, challenges such as limited political support for incorporating community findings, data reliability, and sustainability remain. This study demonstrates how participatory mapping can help mitigate power imbalances in urban planning and provide marginalised communities with tools for advocacy. The CommunityMappers model offers a scalable and sustainable framework for integrating community knowledge into formal mapping processes.
Drawing the Water-Human Relation in Ostracised Occupations of Deltaic Ecologies of the Indian Ocean.
Amrita Dasgupta
Abstract: The sex workers of Mongla reside on the banks of the Passur River. Their occupational land is being gnawed at by the river forcing them to conduct sex trade on the remaining land or on the boats. The women of Mongla brothel are in a continuous conflict with the Bangladesh Government to safeguard their legal “right to livelihood” since 2010 which should get them secured rehabilitation. However, such struggles have yielded no outcomes yet and is rendered complicated given the land ownership history of the space. Their uncelebrated and unarchived lives, I realized would undergo trauma if pushed for direct interviews as part of the research. Hence, I resorted to arts-based research: I condensed the questionnaire into keywords and in a six-month long workshop, each week, I provided them with words that resonated with their lives; such as water, friendships, soil, fish, men. Depending on what kind of emotions these words invoked in them, the sex workers painted for a week and came back to the weekly workshop with their drawings and described them. The descriptions provided an unique widow into their lives and relationship with the water that surrounds them, that no interviews could ever archive. Thus, adding to the scholarship of studying colonial environmental manipulations through port building which continues to affect the marginalised communities living on costal embankments in deltaic geographies. The artistic project provided the sex workers the space to control their narrative and speak about their history, life and livelihood without trauma. The paper is divided into three parts as guided by the stories reflected through the art work: (I) Past and Present of the Mongla Port and Brothel (II) Methodology: Arts-Based Research (III) History and Stories of Life, Livelihood of the Community from Art Pieces.