Attendees of State of the Map in Buenos Aires this weekend may have noticed how Buenos Aires’ villas de miseria - poor precarious neighborhoods - are well mapped on OpenStreetMap.

It’s a great example of how OpenStreetMap enables citizens to just create the map they need: The initiative Caminos de la Villa holds government accountable for public services in low income neighborhoods. The problem was, when the program started, Buenos Aires’ villas weren’t on any digital map. So the teams behind Caminos, the Argentinan technology non-profit Wingu and the social justice group ACIJ rallied a group of locals and put five villas with a total of 27,000 families on the map.

• Fatima (Villa 3)
• Villa 20
• Villa 21-24
• Zavaleta
• Los Piletones

Over the course of 6 months they spent a total of three weeks tracing and surveying the five villas. The result is 638 ways and 102 points of interest added. This was tremendously useful work done in an incredibly short amount of time.

Villa 21-24 / Zavaleta in Buenos Aires before and after the Caminos de la Villa mapping initiative. Source: OpenStreetMap contributors, Asociación Civil por la Igualdad y la Justicia (ACIJ)

Villa 21-24 / Zavaleta is Buenos Aires’ biggest villa with over 40,000 inhabitants. (Mapbox / Digital Globe imagery).

Caminos de la Villa holds government accountable for public services - with OpenStreetMap.