Rio’s favelas are home to a third of the city’s population, but are almost invisible on maps — a situation five young women are trying to change with the help of GPS and the Internet.
Rafaela Goncalves da Silva, 21, has lived in the Santa Marta favela, a poor and dangerous slum, since she was two years old.
She is bringing up her son there and takes him to school each day by cable-car under the watchful gaze of the Christ the Redeemer statue that dominates the city’s horizon.
She is also among the five women recruited by youth organization Rede Jovem to use GPS-equipped cellphones to map and log the streets of Rio’s favelas.
“I start up the GPS at the beginning of the street, then I walk without stopping until the end,” she said.
The information is uploaded to the Wikimapa site, where is available for anyone to access. Some of the streets being mapped do not have an official name.
“I just ask the older residents what they call, the community calls the street,” she said, tapping in one such name — Paciencia Street — into her cellphone.
The mapping project goes beyond just street names, and includes details of local shops, clubs and meeting points.
On this street, Rafaela’s first stop is at Flavio’s, “whose fatty cakes are bad for your heart,” she said, sitting on the sidewalk.
She takes down the name of the shop, a little background, opening hours and a photograph. Within minutes, the information is available on the online map.
There is plenty more for Rafaela to document — football fields, cybercafes, shops, churches. She takes photographs and videos and little escapes her telephone.
Rafaela is one of five so-called “wikireporters” recruited by Rede Jovem.
The five young women, chosen because they are “less timid than boys,” will compete to see who can obtain the most information over the next six months.
The winner will receive a grant to study journalism.
Rede Jovem works to drive social engagement among underprivileged youth by facilitating their access to new information and communication technologies.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A retired US colonel behind a privately financed rocket launch site in the Dominican Republic sees the project as a response to China’s dominance of the space race in Latin America. Florida-based Launch on Demand is slated to begin building a US$600 million facility in a remote region near the border with Haiti late this year. The project is designed to meet surging demand for the heavy-lift rockets needed to put clusters of satellites into orbit. It is also an answer to China’s growing presence in the region, said CEO Burton Catledge, a former commander of the US Air Force’s 45th Operations
Germany is considering Australia’s Ghost Bat robot fighter as it looks to select a combat drone to modernize its air force, German Minister of Defense Boris Pistorius said yesterday. Germany has said it wants to field hundreds of uncrewed fighter jets by 2029, and would make a decision soon as it considers a range of German, European and US projects developing so-called “collaborative combat aircraft.” Australia has said it will integrate the Ghost Bat, jointly developed by Boeing Australia and the Royal Australian Air Force, into its military after a successful weapons test last year. After inspecting the Ghost Bat in Queensland yesterday,
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RSS