Introducing Urb.Im
Tuesday, July 31st, 2012[ by Charles Cameron — my new job, solutions-oriented thinking / writing about urban poverty in 6 cities ]
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Mapping Kibera, Nairobi
Yesterday was my first day at work on my new job with Urb.Im:
The urb.im network is a global community working for just and inclusive cities. It connects practitioners in six cities and throughout the world to establish an international community of practice and learning, sharing ideas and experiences in order to innovate, replicate, and scale working solutions to the problem of urban poverty. urb.im is a project of Dallant Networks and the Ford Foundation.
The six cities we’re focusing on are Mumbai, Rio, Lagos, Mexico DF, Nairobi and Jakarta — and we are strongly solutions-oriented.
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I imagine there will be considerable overlap between the diverse interests of those who follow Zenpundit and the specific cities and issues I’ll be working with at Urb.Im — so this is both a news bulletin about my new employment (suggesting I’ll now be focusing my attention on a new problem and solution set), and an invite to ZP readers to steer me towards relevant materials (eg via hipbonegamer on Twitter), and to join in the discussions at Urb.Im as appropriate.
One of my ambitions is to get some significant cross-website conversations going, so that the widest array of bright minds and good hearts gets together to spark new ideas and possibilities, and put existing resources on the map for all interested parties…
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And speaking of mapping…
The illustration above is of a map of schools in Kibera, Nairobi, one of the largest informal settlements in the world — mapping both problem areas and available solutions is a key element in the kind of work we’ll be doing. For more details on mapping Kibera, see this Urb.Im page, and to download and enlarge the Kibera education-map image, go here.
