The Geography of Hope: Real-Life Stories of Optimists Mapping a Better World
()
About this ebook
From Prague to Berkeley to Nairobi to Kyiv, The Geography of Hope tells the stories of optimists who map the world to a better future.
The Geography of Hope introduces readers to people who are changing the world, using “the most important technology you’ve probably never heard of.” Nine topical stories include radical AI-driven changes in national intelligence, more transparent policing, a father-daughter duo fighting for fair elections, protecting democracy in Eastern Europe, removing deadly explosives across the world after conflicts, and how we can improve K-12 education. This book puts human faces to geographic information system (GIS) mapping and technology in a real-world way that hasn’t been done before.
Former National Audubon Society CEO and award-winning writer and photographer David Yarnold traveled the world to tell new stories: how GIS is helping to create “conservation for and by Africans” to meet the challenges of climate change and threats to wildlife; and how well-known businesses around the world are becoming more profitable through their use of GIS.
Yarnold reveals the GIS all around us in a non-technical way with relatable stories of families, leadership, and collaboration.
- National Geographic-quality full-color photos and illustrations throughout
- Layperson’s explanation of GIS
- Nine compelling events-driven stories of diverse optimists and achievers who are making a difference
David Yarnold
David Yarnold led a GIS-fueled turnaround at the National Audubon Society, helped the Environmental Defense Fund teach China how to do carbon trading, and was executive editor at the San Jose Mercury News. He’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning editor, a Pulitzer finalist for editorial writing, and an award-winning photojournalist and designer. He lives in Tarrytown, NY.
Related to The Geography of Hope
Related ebooks
Integrating Nature-Based Solutions for Climate Change Adaptation and Disaster Risk Management: A Practitioner's Guide Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAddressing Earth's Challenges: GIS for Earth Sciences Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCollaborative Cities: Mapping Solutions to Wicked Problems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe International Geodesign Collaboration: Changing Geography by Design Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsResilient Communities across Geographies Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBefore It's Gone: Stories from the Front Lines of Climate Change in Small-Town America Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsArctic Dreams Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSolved: How other countries cracked the world's biggest problems (and we can too) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Economics of True Sustainability Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Land Is Our Community: Aldo Leopold’s Environmental Ethic for the New Millennium Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsChesapeake Oysters: The Bay's Foundation and Future Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLeaving Planet Simple: Embracing Sustainability, Resilience, and ESG to Transform Your Business Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsReinventing Yourself in Your Retirement Years: Find Joy, Excitement, and Purpose After You Retire Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNew Urban World Journal: Vol 6 (1), March 2018 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Boot Full of Piss Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Honeywood File: An Adventure in Building Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSecond Nature: Scenes from a World Remade Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Mountains Are High: a year of escape and discovery in rural China Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCurious by Nature: One Woman's Exploration of the Natural World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Shopping for Water: How the Market Can Mitigate Water Shortages in the American West Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Birth of Now: The Cause and Effect of the Greatest Change in History Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSustainability A Call to Action Part I: Individual Scale Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAstronomy with a Home Telescope: Top 50 Celestial Bodies to Discover in the Night Sky Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Guide for Bamboozled Grooms and Brides Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Save the Planet in Your Spare Time: A Climate Protection Handbook for the Busy Person Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsUrban Environmental Education Review Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDigital MD: Revolutionizing the Future of Healthcare Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDesigning for Health: The Human-Centered Approach Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What's Possible in the Age of Warming Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLiquid Asset: How Business and Government Can Partner to Solve the Freshwater Crisis Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Technology & Engineering For You
The Art of War Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The ChatGPT Millionaire Handbook: Make Money Online With the Power of AI Technology Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Big Book of Hacks: 264 Amazing DIY Tech Projects Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Nuclear War: A Scenario Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Night to Remember: The Sinking of the Titanic Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ham Radio For Dummies Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Big Book of Maker Skills: Tools & Techniques for Building Great Tech Projects Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Systems Thinker: Essential Thinking Skills For Solving Problems, Managing Chaos, Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Basic Machines and How They Work Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The CIA Lockpicking Manual Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Art of Tinkering: Meet 150+ Makers Working at the Intersection of Art, Science & Technology Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A History of the American People Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rethinking Narcissism: The Bad---and Surprising Good---About Feeling Special Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for The Geography of Hope
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
The Geography of Hope - David Yarnold
Chapter 1
The Life Water of Prague
How data helps build the future of an iconic city—and democracy
The Charles Bridge over the Vltava River, which bisects Prague.Signs displaying the Metropolitan Plan.The Center for Architecture and Metropolitan Planning (CAMP) has become a popular hub for citizens of Prague. CAMP says that 50,000 people visited to view a new Metropolitan Plan, which is due in 2025.
Three decades after the fall of communism, a world-class GIS team in Prague, Czechia, balances wildly competing priorities to create the city of their future. The 42 GIS specialists at the Institute of Planning and Development (IPR) have mapped where all the medieval passageways lead and where Ukrainian refugees have been housed in tent camps. They’ve shown where a new ring road around the city might unsnarl traffic never intended for cobblestone streets laid out in the 15th century. They produce maps that look back, protecting a center city designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, while guiding the growth of a tech-savvy European capital.
The GIS professionals and the roughly 200 architects, lawyers, and administrators at IPR are mostly under 40, and they’re working to design a balanced city that puts quality of life first. They’ve built a GIS-centric culture for architects, engineers, government officials, and the public, who trust and rely on IPR’s maps.
IPR’s maps do what GIS data makes possible in cities across the world: they visualize the central nervous system that makes a city run. From managing police and fire response systems to showing the best locations for new transit stops to identifying digital deserts, GIS-based decisions inform local governments everywhere.
But IPR does even more. Like Prague’s much-visited, 500-year-old Powder Tower, part of a wall built to defend the city’s center, the institute’s transparency and community engagement create a modern bulwark. Citizen participation, fueled by a GIS-based vision for the city’s future, nurtures an adolescent democracy haunted by corruption and totalitarian ghosts.
IPR brings tens of thousands annually to an extraordinarily cool, modernist public space called CAMP. Its vibe has helped make IPR a favorite of local media and a growing wave of young supporters. Thanks to a visionary former mayor, the institute was designed to be insulated from partisan politics through an arm’s-length relationship with the city government.
But IPR’s mandate to offer impartial advice to the city’s decision-makers still faces constant threats. If IPR had a soundtrack, it would be punctuated by dissonant, ominous chords.
Shared data also turns out to be a powerful shield. In 2020, when the president of the Czech Republic, also known as Czechia, limited access to Prague Castle, the seat of national government on Prague’s highest hilltop, IPR staff supplied citizens with maps of legally designated public spaces. With maps held high, the advocates went to court, forcing the nation’s top elected official to reopen Prague’s crown jewel.
Across the city, new parks have popped up to mitigate climate change, and a communist-era rail yard that will be home to 10,000 new apartments is being reconnected to the downtown core. On Prague’s GeoPortal, https://www.geoportalpraha.cz, users find an ambitious 30-year plan with neighborhood-scale detail about where more nursery schools and general practitioners will be needed. There are cycling maps, accessibility maps, data on population dynamics, an environmental atlas, and a 3D map of the city’s neighborhoods, among dozens of other applications.
Map locating Prague, Czech Republic in central Europe.Almost 20 percent of the Czech Republic’s population lives in Prague.
Jiří Čtyroký and Marek Zděradička.Jiří Čtyroký, standing behind, and deputy director Marek Zděradička on the institute’s rooftop. CAMP is visible over Čtyroký’s shoulder—and the institute is next to a 16th-century monastery.
An unexpected driver of democracy
As I talked with leaders across Prague who rattled off examples of GIS-based decisions, they eventually shared the same unexpected backstory: GIS turns out be a driver of political evolution in the Czech Republic. IPR’s own creation story begins with an anti-corruption, pro-democracy revolt.
Visitors climb stone and wood steps in a bell tower.The climb up the ancient stairway in the city’s iconic Church of Our Lady before Týn.
A generation of young leaders across the city believe in both GIS and transparency, institutionalizing democratic processes by engaging 1.3 million residents. But IPR and others constantly look over their shoulders, knowing they’re just an election away from a return to top-down decisions and backroom deals. It’s not the first thing people told me, but they almost all got around to it.
That doesn’t surprise Jiři Pehe, head of New York University in Prague. He tracks the evolution of democracy in the Czech Republic and other Eastern Bloc countries. In a 2019 panel discussion, he said, Creating a facade of political democracy takes two or three years, a market economy about five years, but a full-fledged democracy … would take about 60 years.
Equally important, Pehe says, We need a generational change, and we need people who internalize certain values, which are important for democracy.
Filip Folger, 32, director of Prague’s Spatial Development Department, reflects that generational change. He launched a web portal in mid-2022 designed to gather public feedback on the development of new neighborhoods. More than 5,000 responses poured in over two months, and Folger created a GIS-based heat map to convey the location of every comment and the intensity of the feedback. It was great to see how open it was because this isn’t normal in Prague,
he says. Nobody did it in the past. Every four years, we have elections [that determine] how transparent or how democratic you want to be.
IPR brings optimism to a culture that still has one foot in a history of limitations and secrecy, a glass half empty,
in Pehe’s words. IPR’s leadership has attracted a team that goes beyond what’s asked by the bureaucrats or officials who cycle through their terms. The institute uses its data and maps to help envision better possible futures—it brings a glass half full.
IPR’s founder, Prague’s former mayor and GIS expert Tomáš Hudeček, puts a mystical Czech spin on it: he calls the institute the life water of Prague
—water that brings energy and revival, a mashup of Czech and Slavic legends.
The guide to the life water
Jiří Čtyroký (pronounced Yee-zhee Shtee-row-key) is the institute’s director and guide to the life water. He’s 6'2, and his upswept eyebrows echo the wings of his center-parted hair. Starting with IPR’s predecessor in 1997, he’s a survivor, and he’s been director for nearly two decades. This is what he’s learned:
I try to be a step ahead, before politicians or colleagues."
He’s also built political capital and an international reputation. The institute regularly shares best practices with GIS all-star cities such as Helsinki, Rotterdam, Vienna, Hamburg, and Singapore. Čtyroký helped the nation’s second-largest municipality, Brno, form its own IPR two years ago.
He’s eager to share his city as we walk about half an hour across the cobblestones from IPR to Old Town Square. He’s easygoing and patient, good-humored. But you can hear a stone-cold pragmatist when he talks about the politics of Prague: The data matters. And he who has the data is IPR.
The world’s oldest working astronomical clock, built in AD 1410. It is located in the Old Town City Hall on Old Town Square.
As we arrive, we’re joined by IPR’s director and chief advocate, Ondřej Boháč, and Tomáš Hudeček, the godfather of IPR. Boháč, it turns out, is a lay leader with the keys to the twin towers of the landmark cathedral on the square, the Church of Our Lady before Týn. We’re also with two other locals. Both are bubbling about being able to go up to the bell tower in the cathedral that was started in 1394 and completed in the 1600s. Like most Prague resi- dents, neither has ever had access to the ancient stairways of the 24-story church.
After spiraling up 115 stone steps (I’m silently counting as we climb), we go up 14 more sets of wood stairs. In places, there’s a latticework of 12 × 12
crossbeams supporting the stone walls, and shafts of light slip through arched, gothic windows. When we get to the bell tower, we step outside, onto a four-foot-wide walkway.
Hudeček, Boháč, and Čtyroký point to the cranes on the city’s horizon, signs of new housing. They bend over the wall to look straight down at the restaurants that were renovated during the COVID-19 pandemic. They laugh, talking over each other as they gesture to buildings and share backstories about bumbling developers.
It’s clear they share a bond that comes from building something special. Earlier that afternoon, Čtyroký and IPR’s deputy director Marek Zděradička told us how in 2021 the mayor asked which department had responsibility for the city’s trees in famous Charles Square.
No surprise, the data IPR mapped showed that multiple agencies took care of some of the same trees. Čtyroký says, We were asked by the mayor to extend this approach not only to greenery but to all property in public domains. So we will follow now … in all public spaces, property like roads, pavements, trim lines, whatever.
Čtyroký knows there are a lot of toes that could get stepped on in the process.
In part because of IPR’s quasi-independent status, and maybe a little because the institute can come across as the smartest kid in the room, it finds itself respected and admired—but sometimes targeted. Even when your answers are data-driven and requested by the mayor, nobody wants to be called out as the third or fourth agency taking care of someone else’s trees.
When you’re independent, you’re on your own
Because the institute reports to a deputy mayor and not the city’s bureaucracy, IPR is spared the daily territorial skirmishes at City Hall, but its distance also allows jealousies to fester around who gets IPR’s time and attention. Some council members, Čtyroký says, want their own advisers, experts who will reliably agree with them. And then there are the revanchists, the leaders who haven’t bought into modern democracy and see transparency and IPR as nuisances—or enemies.
Only a few decades have passed since Václav Havel’s Velvet Revolution marked the end of Czech communism in 1989. What the Czechs call the wild ’90s
saw a free-for-all, when anyone with a capitalist scheme could get traction, part of a powerful backlash to decades of communism’s centralized planning.
When that approach led to a series of local and national corruption scandals, Prague overcorrected in 1999, Hudeček says, with the creation of what an IPR leader described as a very specific and not very understandable system
of planning.
That plan prescribed the use of every structure in the city, but it never specified building heights in a place that treasures its historic vistas above all else. It turned every construction proposal into a thorny negotiation. Fast-forward to 2013, when Hudeček, an unlikely mayor, created the institute. It was part of his technocratic ideal of a local government that valued data and expert advice. This served to moderate the wildest swings of the political pendulum and move down the 60-year path to democracy that historian Pehe referenced.
Everyone’s priority: The living history
Prague might be one of the most well-mapped cities on Earth. The red clay tile roofs, the gothic towers, massive public squares, the oldest functioning astronomical clock in the world, and the iconic Charles Bridge form a core that transports visitors back in time. Many of the buildings in the protected historic district are in the New Town, laid out by King Charles IV, the Czechs’ most revered monarch, in 1348. He designed new squares, bridges, and streets because the old town (dating back to AD 900) had no room to grow.
Whether you talk with city administrators or the team at IPR, there’s a cardinal rule: protect the 1,322 buildings that are part of the UNESCO designation, the riverbanks, and the character of the historic district. Its buildings and bridges whisper Czech history all day, every day. Nearly two-thirds of those buildings are more than 100 years old.
Preservation is also good for business. Sixty percent of the city’s pre-COVID revenue came from tourism.
Planners working for communist regimes in the 1950s and ’60s mapped every interior wall and every floor of every building, says Čtyroký. I’m a little skeptical, and Čtyroký gives me a bit of a side-eye. Well, they were pretty good at planning,
he