Summer on a GeoBike: "Mapping for Recreation" Project Activities, Methods and Tools

This report presents a citizen science project "Mapping for Recreation (Map4Rec)” with temporarily dislaced children and youth from Ukraine residing in refugee facilities in the Twente region of The Netherlands. The project ran in the summer of 2023, and engaged participants in the active exploration and mapping of public places for sports and recreation. The key objective of this report is to showcase the multifaceted nature of place-based citizen science, which – apart from collecting valuable data on youth’s perception and use of urban spaces – allows participants to gain new knowledge and skills, to restore key basic needs such as autonomy and sociality, to explore and gain first-hand, embodied knowledge of their new home towns, and to deepen and capture this knowledge in an online map, as well as through art and storytelling. The report outlines key project activities including their objective, form, and implementation, followed by the project team’s initial observations and recommendations. Methodolog-ically, it draws on informal discussions with participants, an ex-post survey of participants’ experiences, as well as project leaders’ observations. The report is organized as follows. Section 2 provides background information on the Map4Rec project, followed by Section 3 that details key project activities grouped into “Introduction”, “Co-creation”, “Fieldwork”, “Project work” and “Closing event”. Section 4 provides initial observations and recommendations, and concludes the report with our thoughts on the future directions within this line of work. This report is to be published on April 4, 2025 in the Living Maps Review, Issue 17.