Open spatial data and planning technologies have revolutionized global humanitarian efforts.

Slum dwellers have shown that mapping and data can be collected by local communities, and be a force to transform their cities and neighborhoods.

It’s simple: to fight climate change and fulfill urbanization’s potential for development, the capacity to create and use local data is non-negotiable.

Our mission is to ensure everyone has access to it, becomes part of the same map and of the future of their cities.

TransformYourCity by the numbers:

• Know Your City has supported >7,000 local communities in >200 cities to collect their data, crate maps, and advocate their priorities

• Each community includes savings groups, settlement maps, and a data census of its assets, experiences, challenges and priorities towards the co-design of city transformations.

• This has included 370,089 people in savings groups, improved sanitation for 55,964 households, improved water for 230, 407 households, secured land tenure for 359,353 households, provided clean energy for 21,822 households, and improved housing for 23,003 households.

• This process has also enabled new dialogues and collaborations between informal settlements and their governments, participatory slum upgrading via expanded service and infrastructure provision, land tenure recognition, and coordinated bottom-up climate risk-mapping and adaptation.

• We have have co-produced geospatial maps in over 1.7M places representing >1 billion people.

• Since Q2 2022, we have trained 19,792 people in mapping and technology, 8,647 of whom were women.

• We count on 500.3K volunteer mappers (Tasking Manager), 685K OSM Volunteer Mappers. HOT has 4,478 datasets on the HDX repository, downloaded more than 349,000 times since January 2020.

• Our method are co-designed with communities, but also always explore the possibilities of new technologies, including drones, AI and photogrammetry.

• All our methods and tools are open, replicable and free for worldwide use and improvement under a creative commons license.

• We have produced the first analysis of informality and infrastructure deficits in each street block of sub-Saharan Africa.

• We have rigorously established the relationship between informality, lack of services, and low human development in peer-reviewed publications.

We have perfected peer-to-peer learning among slum-dweller communities. This magnifies local impacts, creates civic collaborations, accelerates problem solving, and promotes creative new uses of data and technology.

Our networks of slum-dwellers span 18 nations and 224 cities in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Our humanitarian and climate-risk mapping reaches an additional 78 nations.

Both models are based on physical learning hubs and are ready to scale up.