Guerrilla Gardening- Baltimore Crowdsourcing Map

Blue Raster enabled BNIA-JFI (Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance-Jacob France Institute) to setup and launch their new interactive map for community gardens and open spaces in Baltimore with ArcGIS Online Accelerate. The Interactive Map of Community-Managed Open Space assists city residents in discovering natural spaces they can protect, claim, and effectively use for their community in an urban location. Take a look at this video to see the site in action. The site also allows users to search by address or garden, view gardens by categories and submit pictures.

Interactive Map of Community Managed Open Space

Seema D. Iyer, associate director of the Jacob France Institute at the University of Baltimore’s Merrick School of Business, said that the website will help communities and community-based organizations visualize where greening efforts have been occurring as they work to coordinate resources:

“BNIA-JFI utilized Blue Raster’s ArcGIS Online Accelerate program to help launch an online mapping platform for data that we integrated from five different organizations with overlapping information.  Blue Raster quickly understood our technical needs, met our aggressive timeframe, helped us build our own internal capacity to maintain the site, and provided professional advice on how to augment the site in the future.  We look forward to working with them again.”

ArcGIS Online and Flickr API allowed five different organizations – Baltimore Green Space, Parks and People, Master Gardeners, the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future and Baltimore City’s Power in Dirt project – to aid governmental and non-governmental agencies synchronize “greening activities”. The Interactive Map of Community-Managed Open Space is helping local groups across the city preserve uncluttered space.

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