People-based GIS: This new paradigm of analysis and visualization is undoubtedly promising and offers potentially radical new ways to devise of motion in time and space (I found particularly interesting Miller’s rhetoric of “exchanging” these two variables). But I wonder who are the “people” that this GIS is based on and how we can use these new paradigms to help not only those with easy access to new technologies (or wireless connnections for that matter). Another student raised the question of how to evaluate which data to use from the abundance available to researchers. In market applications, it makes sense to privilege that data which will gain money for a firm. However, those with reliable incomes often have reliable transport, and as such, are not those most in need of infrastructural and transportation improvements. The new field of GIS must take into account (along with the seemingly countless technical aspects of reliable data collection) the more social aspects that may indicate to us who may most benefit from this field of research. This means extending our questions outside of the urban core, the middle class, the educated and the mobile.
Herein lies an interesting space wherein methods of participatory GIS may thrive. By working with marginalised or remote populations and the tools at their own disposal, people-based geography may be able to live up to its name. It is important in conceptualizing research methodologies that we speak to specific ways of being and ways of knowing. While the theoretical aspect of people-based GIS is at times hard to digest, its implementation could have important implications, especially in the field of accessibility. As such, one of the maor challenges for the discipline will be incorporating those populations for whom accessibility is a major issue. It will also mean looking at methods of data collection that address the specific needs and ways of being of those communities with restricted physical or social mobility.
WYATT
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