Residents from the cities of Detroit, Highland Park, and Hamtramck will be able to work together within their neighborhoods and historic districts to locate and harvest fruit trees.  The website will easily allow each respective neighborhood to look after their existing fruit trees.  Since the 139 square miles of Detroit would be near impossible to map by any one individual; it is important that this information is centrally provided for each section of the city and data ownership is kept within the neighborhoods so that solely those residents are aware of the fruit resources within their community.

The Pomaceous Detroit Fruit Mapping Project will encourage community members to seek out fruit trees and this requires that they can easily and properly identify them.  The website will provide a reference guide relevant to the Detroit Bio-region and other resources that will help to identify trees and map them.  With proper funding the mapping website would be able to be translated into Spanish, Arabic, and other languages that become necessary as the user base increases and diversifies. Specifically, food security would be addressed through the use of the mapping website.  Fruit trees that are a local source of fresh produce are dropping thousands of pounds of food annually and could easily be nourishing the proximate populations.

The impact of this project when implemented would gradually change and contribute to the food system in Detroit and surrounding areas.  Community members will be able to internalize the cost of fruit.  The social return would be echoed in the community building aspect of how the project is being framed.

In addition to the local impact, Pomaceous Detroit can serve as an example of cross-cultural/trans-border technological collaboration: it is built on the same software that Haitians use to map disaster relief efforts and Britons use to track public transit issues.  The project is an exercise in marginalized communities working together via the web to develop solutions to similar problems.

The first stage of the project uses ready-made hosted solutions such as Ushahidi’s Crowdmap service.  As the project grows and developers get interested in it, we hope to customize the Ushahidi software to better fit the project’s needs.  Specifically, in Detroit, there is a need for a better cell-phone interface to the service.  Also, more advanced import/export facilities are needed.  As these improvements are made, they will be fed back into the larger Ushahidi development network.

The existing fruit is being wasted; simply by making locations known and accessible it would provide at a very low cost (time for searching and harvesting) fresh sources of fruit. 

Detroit may not have a high computer literacy rate, but we do have a very high cell-phone literacy.  Not many community organizing projects attempt to leverage this.  Pomaceous Detroit’s tree mapping initiative will attempt to empower people’s cellphone and street knowledge by allowing people to add value to their communities by simply walking around their neighborhood and texting about trees.

The Pomaceous Detroit Fruit Mapping Project would be easily replicated in other cities world wide.  This is made possible by using the free software interface provided by Ushahidi.  With some preparation and diligence countless other cities could have a similar project.

Allied Media will service as our sponsor and technological advisor.

Project Details

Project url: 

http://pomaceousdetroit.crowdmap.com/

Project image: 

Supporting organization: 

Allied Media

Locations