Exciting plans afoot: phase 2 of Public Map

The first of October 2025 marked the end of Public Map Platform Phase 1 and the beginning of Phase 2 with £3.1 million of funding for the next 30 months from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. This involves a reorganisation of our team and a reaffirmation of our central objective - supporting the development of Green Transition behaviours. So, what have we achieved on this delightful roller coaster of a research project?

Firstly, we have built an extraordinary team of committed and visionary individuals, most notably our locally based Co-Ordinators, community mappers and, of course, the bards. They’ve been teaching mapping in schools, developing and delivering our Lle Llais events and pop-up events (such as the Eisteddfod Genedlaethol and the Anglesey Show) in an inclusive way (drawing on the expertise of our critical friend Anne Collis). They are supporting the development of the next generation of critical community scientists who know how to capture data and what to do with it. We are really pleased to have created rewarding jobs that build on the resourcefulness, vision, and skill of people in the area.

Together with our Cardiff team, we’ve been developing ‘teaching pack’ resources for community mapping and deep engagement with children and young people, working towards getting digital mapping into the Curriculum for Wales. The demand for community mapper training is high and in Phase 2 we are building a Community Interest Company to offer mapper training widely as we work towards Phase 3. Our mappers will continue to work on building maps and mapping in ways that encourage inclusive ways of working and green transition behaviours, most notably around farming, food, tourism, waste, resource use and amplifying the voices of children and young people.

We are also very interested in the evident interplays between local culture, language and green transition behaviours. Our research led by Bangor University has shown that when people work in Welsh, they evidence more care for their environment.

We’ve developed a method for making digital maps with children and young people, enabling them to put on the maps the things that matter to them most. Working with Play Disrupt, children and young people have been developing an animated symbology for maps based on the things that they believe should go onto the map. Free Ice Cream have been trialling Happenings, a mapping system that helps gather data about neighbourhoods, as well as mapping centres of resilience on the Ynys Môn.

In Cardiff, the WISERD team have been collating hundreds of layers from Data Map Wales overlaying this with data that we’ve gathered from organisations across the island, including over 60 data sets from Cyngor Ynys Môn and the highly granular data that we’ve been collecting with communities. They have been able to scrape data from PDF documents and spatialise it within maps. We are in the process of curating maps around Wales’ Well-being Goals. These will show public bodies, including Public Services Boards, what’s possible when assessing well-being in their area and helping to develop Well-being Objectives. The Beta version will be published and available via this website in January.

It is going to be interesting to see the responses of communities when they see, for example, the dangerous levels of ammonia pollution that they are experiencing in their villages (achieved by overlaying Open Street Map with Natural Resources Wales data). Very importantly, we will be developing a service offer to show how Public Map can assist with inclusive, effective and robust Local Development Planning. In the first instance, we plan to unpack the hundreds of inaccessible layers of an existing Local Development Plan into intelligible layered maps.

Children and young people are starved of social infrastructure, places to hang out in safe and creative ways. We want to illustrate what can happen when the high street is repurposed for children and young people’s learning. Going forward our team in Llangefni is going to move into a shop, an Ynys Môn Room, providing a public frontage for our engagement activities in line with the Urban Room Network model. A further Room is in development in Wrexham situated in the favourable surroundings of Tŷ Pawb, with pop ups planned across the area. Our mappers will also be working with Eryri National Park, Pontypridd and a range of other communities. Additional Cambridge University Large Grant funding means that we will also be hiring community mappers into the Cambridge Room, learning from the mapping team on Ynys Môn, developing activities and opportunities in this, the most unequal city in Britain.

Thanks to the tireless work of Rachel Hughes of Dotiau, our committed Regional and Wales Advisory Group members will continue championing Public Map within Welsh Government at the highest levels and across Wales’ public and voluntary sectors. Our recent Public Map launch at the Senedd in Cardiff showed just how much interest there is in our approach, and we have high hopes for the next phase. A Local Advisory Group in the planning pressure cooker of Cambridge will explore the potential of Public Map in the very different policy context of Cambridge. There is growing global interest in the project – we are off to Paris in November to talk about its potential there.

Please get in touch if you are interested in working with our mappers in your area.