Mapping the Unmapped

What cars with fancy cameras attached to the roof are to Google Maps, young women with pen and paper are to Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, or HOT, a nonprofit using an open-source data platform to map parts of the world prone to the worst ravages of climate change. Maddy Crowell embeds with a HOT crew in St. Lucia to learn about their vital work:

I followed my mapping group toward an empty road. A few chickens broke into a trot in front of us. I was already disoriented: Without street names or addresses, it was difficult to find our place on the map. We reached an intersection where a grand stucco church with gilded windows stood before us. A few women in the group already knew it as St. Joseph the Worker Catholic Church, which they used as a landmark to orient us on the map. Then, Weeks spotted a green street sign, likely leftover from a century of British and French colonial rule, its white lettering all but faded by the sun. It wasn’t until we were a few feet away that we could make out the faint word “Marina.” Weeks pinpointed the narrow lane on the map on her clipboard and labeled it. We took a left, down a street named Church, toward the shoreline. 

Weeks was 24 when she discovered HOT’s cartography through a charity at her church. In 2021, she joined a field-mapping trip in St. Lucia’s southernmost city, Vieux Fort. With a small group, Weeks went door-to-door to record houses, street names, and businesses. Afterward, everyone went to a school computer lab to add their findings to OpenStreetMap. When Weeks pulled up the map of St. Lucia, she was stunned. She’d used Google Maps before, mostly to check traffic patterns, but had never seen her island from above. She spent hours correcting mistakes. Weeks was hooked. “It’s so addictive!” she told me as we stood at an abandoned bar near the water, surveying where we were. In the past two weeks alone, she’d made 5,584 edits, clicking away online, filling in the contours of buildings as seen from above.