Community Mapping

The Village That Drew Its Own Map.

Building resilience through community knowledge in Lethe, Jamaica.

Jamaica and her Caribbean siblings are often described as resilient. A resilient people and a resilient land. To survive and thrive in the face of adversity, exploitation, natural and unnatural disaster, throughout their history into their present, resilience is very evident. Resilience exists in a space of vulnerability, and of environmental and economic precarity. The recent devastation of Hurricane Melissa has made this once again so heartbreakingly clear. The lived reality of many, particularly the most vulnerable and marginalised, forced yet another display of resilience, where they had to adapt to new realities, innovate, and rely on community care networks. Some especially benefited from strong community leadership and cohesion, encompassing both mitigation and preparedness efforts, as well as responsiveness.

This year, Jamaica marks 64 years of Independence, under the theme of "United in Celebrating Resilience". While we rightly celebrate our resilience, we also ask how this resilient spirit can be used to better protect and prepare our communities for various crises.

Up in the hills, smaller communities such as Lethe can easily be forgotten in larger scale efforts to respond and prepare. Representing the plight of many such communities in the west of the island following Hurricane Melissa, Lethe is geographically unique in that it is situated along the border of two parishes, divided by the Great River flowing through the centre of the community, Hanover to the west and St James to the east.

Almost ten months following the passage of Melissa, Lethe is still building back. Homes are still destroyed, without water, while the infant school remains unusable, squeezing all the community's children into one school building. The schoolchildren recount how high the water from the river reached in the building, sharing this new reality with us as they imagine rebuilding a small garden and managing classes in the smaller, shared spaces. Though remnants of the damage remain in the schoolyard, with broken play equipment and what is left of benches and tables, it is hard to picture the space inundated by river water just months earlier.

Support for the community has taken a number of forms, such as Rebecca Hussey and Eleanor Crichton of Lethe, who mobilised funds and resources through an online fundraiser in the wake of the hurricane, providing supplies to the school and other affected families. This is just one example of the engagement from locals and Jamaica's diaspora communities. Having learned of Lethe's situation through the fundraiser, we saw an opportunity to spotlight Lethe and connect with the community to support continued efforts towards building resilience.

Often, when it comes to creating solutions to strengthen resilience at this level, the community's voice is left out. But is the community not the one with all the knowledge about the place they live in? They are the first to know when a road has a pothole or to feel the impacts of changes in tourism patterns, because they are the first to suffer when such a thing happens.

With the intention to amplify and activate the community's voice, we set out to take our learnings from the university theoretical setting, and put them into practice in Lethe. With support from Rebecca and Eleanor, we facilitated a community-first workshop that utilised a well-researched urban planning tool: Community Mapping.

Community Mapping is a visual tool that allows residents to pinpoint their thoughts about their community on a map, be it positive, neutral, or negative. Participants are asked to mark infrastructure, programmes, or natural resources that they like or dislike, as well as to identify on the map the contextually specific social relations and structures which influence responses to crises.

Through the support of our community connections and the identification of community champions, we conducted a community mapping session on 12 June, held at Lethe Primary and Infant School. With the aim of gathering and empowering voices with diverse perspectives, we brought together twelve community members ranging from students to retired persons, and from educators and social workers to tour guides and bamboo raft captains.

During the session, community members were asked to share what they believe is important to protect, where they identify key vulnerabilities, and what they rely on in the present day in a time of crisis. Key highlights included participants identifying the need to protect and maintain physical features, such as the historic Stone Bridge, which serves both practical and social functions to connect the two sides of the community. The bridge has long provided a space for people to socialise, strengthening residents' sense of belonging and identity. Given that the bridge is also an important heritage landmark built by enslaved people in 1820, community members emphasised the need to provide an additional way to safely cross the river in order to allow, for instance, heavy water trucks to cross without damage, and to ensure that one side of Lethe would not be isolated should the Stone Bridge be compromised.

Flowing under this iconic bridge is another physical feature highlighted by residents, the Great River, which is not only a natural beauty and source of pride, but also the underpinning of Lethe's primary economic driver, raft tours. Though the river was calm upon our visit, it was clear that the force of nature cannot be underestimated, knowing that the river overflowing during the hurricane caused significant damage and flooding to the surrounding areas. Pauline Wright, a retired teacher, shared a memory that 47 years earlier, on the very day of the workshop, the river had overflowed its banks, just as it did during Hurricane Melissa. This local historic knowledge reiterates the unpredictability of major flooding, highlighting the risks posed to the livelihoods of raft tour guides. In response, rafters and other community members emphasised the power of operating as a collective.

Representing the future of Lethe, the eager Grade 5 and 6 students shared their concerns and ideas about the need to avoid water pollution and keep the river clean by engaging young people to help clean up and encourage a sense of community responsibility. With a creative imagination, they suggested using the plentiful resource of bamboo, used to make the iconic rafts, to create garbage bins for proper waste disposal around the community.

The mapping exercise also found a close relationship between community assets and vulnerabilities, with consensus around needing to protect the tourism industry and the river flowing through the community, recognising these as unique areas of potential. While the community can rely on each other in times of need by opening up homes to neighbours and facilitating consistent community dialogue, existing responses to crises show that there is a general lack of adequately secure structures and shelters to stay safe.

The hope with such a hands-on and responsive process is to ensure that research does not stay as research; that academics, policymakers, and businesses do not only speak in their own circles, but rather prioritise community needs and voices and steer community-led solutions. Now that the community of Lethe has come together to build consensus on what they believe is important, they are more likely to continue working together to co-create their own initiatives as well as communicate their resource needs at the institutional level.

To jumpstart the latter process, all findings from the Lethe workshop were then presented at the Caribbean Urban Forum in Kingston, Jamaica on 19 June, to a room of roughly twenty participants. The conference, which started as the inspiration for the Lethe workshop, came full circle when we presented our findings to support the conference's theme on rethinking resilience and recovery in the Caribbean. We facilitated a "next steps" session to brainstorm potential policy and programme solutions for the Lethe community based on what they shared was important to them. In order to bridge the gap between the community members and conference participants, community members were invited to share thoughts on the process via video conference at the session, thereby increasing the visibility of Lethe's needs and grounding the workshop in real experiences.

The project showcased that true knowledge of a place comes from the communities themselves and their lived experiences. We hope this work has created momentum, engagement, and action. Methods like community mapping provide a structure and a voice, all while supporting stronger community cohesion and dialogue.

"I am extremely honoured to know person[s] have interest in our little village. I embraced the opportunity to share the uniqueness of our community and the treasures that lie within. Looking forward [to] any future initiatives to build back stronger and maintain our rich heritage." — Brenda-Lee Black, past student and Alumni President, Lethe Primary and Infant School

This is just a first step for Lethe, having tapped into their inherent knowledge of and care for their community. While this foundation provides a platform for them to identify their needs and advocate for them, the wider Jamaican community, at home and abroad, bears a responsibility to listen and support in line with these identified needs. In this way, Jamaica can empower its communities, redefining their resilience, while setting an example for the region as a whole.

Venus Dulani is based in Hong Kong and holds a Master of Urban Planning from the National University of Singapore, and a Bachelor of Science in Urban and Regional Studies from Cornell University. She has a background in policy and sustainability research and consulting, including a stint at the United Nations under the Small Island Developing States programme, and is eager to meaningfully contribute to capacity building for resilience and recovery in the Caribbean.

Julian Menko is a graduate of an MSc in Urban Science, Policy and Planning in Singapore and former Policy Advisor for Planning in the Cayman Islands. As a West Indian, Julian shares in the grief and urgency of recovery and resilience in the face of more devastating climate events due to human activity. His experiences have focused on participatory planning and placemaking, urban research, regenerative design, heritage preservation and community-led approaches outside of dominant western narratives.