GIS placement at Sahmakum Teang Tnaut

Wilfred Waters | Geospatial Analyst

Sahmakum Teang Tnaut (STT)

Mission: to provide pro-poor technical assistance for housing and infrastructure and to inform dialogue and raise awareness about urban issues

Helping communities in Phnom Penh to communicate their concerns about

land rights issues to local and international media, donors and other non

government organisations (NGOs) & INGOs

Some Context

• About 400 urban poor communities (“slums”) in

Phnom Penh

• Subject to increasingly violent evictions

• Not always given relocation sites or compensation

– Relocation sites often have substandard

conditions

• Subject of report by Zoe Daniel on ABC‟s Foreign

Correspondent last week

87 displacement events since 1990

100,000+ people

Second time for some: whole city evicted by Pol Pot

Capacity building

• Building something for an organisation

VS

• Building something with staff of an

organisation

Before placement:

• No centralised storage

• No map standards

• No file naming standards

• No metadata

• Old reference data

• Differences between teams

After consultation:

• Server

• Spatial warehouse

• Database

• ArcReader deployment

• Map templates

• Standard job folder

• File naming convention

• SOPs for DB and server

• Some metadata

• Current reference data

• Adding to OpenStreetMap

(creating reference data for

others)

Construction site symbology missing

A map after templates and spatial

warehouse were introduced

New roads digitised and

added to .GDB in spatial

warehouse

Marginalia, key map, title,

sources etc gathered into a

side bar

Symbology

is suitable for

black and

white display

Map and all

data

available on

server (job

folder and

SW), anyone

can work on

it

SOURCES!

Map of the 54 relocation

sites in Phnom Penh

Main finding: Level of basic infrastructure

(access to and price of utilities, number of

toilets and access to services (schools,

health centres etc)) decreased (except for

utility price) for relocation sites that were:

further from the city

where they had fewer inhabitants

where they were newer

Problem description for database

• „Black hole‟ for data storage

• 6 years‟ worth of demographic, point data in spreadsheets

• Data entry errors were frequent

• Data was hard to exploit, such as:

comparing new datasets with old ones about the same issue

retrieving information across different datasets about one

particular location

Solution: relational database

STT relational database

• On server

• Backend to ArcGIS

• MS Access

• because usually one person doing data entry,

• 3-4 simultaneous users (via Access itself or

ArcReader or ArcMap)

Flow map

• Date, from and to information for evictions

• Fed a query from the DB into ArcMap’s XY to

Line tool

• Lines represent ‘relocation waves’

• Easier to understand the information about

internally displaced people in Cambodia

An early map of evictions information

Flow map animation

Cambodia OSM Mapping Party Participants

• Approx 30 new OSM mappers, about 20 of them Cambodian

• 37 hours spent during 3 mapping parties

• +many more hours outside those times

• Adrian from openstreetmap.la/files/cambodia does shapefileexports for us monthly now

Outcomes

Capacity building

• Staff have basic database skills

• Staff are better at information management/governance

• Further training required, hire DB administrator

Information management

• Spatial data governance standards and procedures

(SOP)

• Database

• ArcReader deployment

• The ‘black hole’ has reduced in size…

New dataset

• Movement of people relocated from Phnom Penh

Final note - networking

• Many mappers in

Phnom Penh

• Monthly Phnom Penh

Mapping Meetup

• 23 presenters over 9

meetups

• Search Facebook for

the Phnom Penh

Mapping Meetup

• Next: 17 December