Participatory Photo Mapping

Participatory Photo Mapping (PPM) is a tool for exploring the "experience of place" and for communicating this experience to community stakeholders and decision-makers. Using Participatory Photo Mapping helps uncover supports and barriers to well-being, especially related to the built environment. The PPM approach photography, narrative stories, and mapping.

The PPM process has four steps:
Step 1: Provide participants with digital cameras and GPS units and have them take pictures of their neighborhood, documenting routine use of community and recreation environments.

Step 2: These photos become the objects of focus group sessions in which open dialogue creates emerging themes that are attached to particular images. Conduct focus group and narrative sessions where the photographs are projected onto a wall and community people talk about the images and are engaged in exploring perceptions of their neighborhood environment.

Step 3: The images are then geocoded as part of a neighborhood-level geographic information system that includes other demographic and spatial data, such as population, household characteristics and crime statistics, to create a qualitative GIS focused on the experience of community and recreation environments.

Step 4: Use learned knowledge to communicate the information to local decision-makers, such as health professionals, business owners, community organizations, and policy makers.
Below are some links to videos by Dr. , originally designed, to develop and design collaborative projects and networks to improve health and well-being of communities by strengthening health information systems and sharing that information with community stakeholders and public health decision-makers.

PPM allows you to:

• assess the community and environmental contributions to health, safety and well-being, 
• address peoples’ perceptions of their neighborhood environments, 
• identify environmental factors that impact health and well-being, 
• identify community supports and barriers to health and well-being, present this information to stakeholders and decision-makers. 

Watch the videos (links below) to learn more about this tool.

Video 1

Video 2

Video 3

Video 4

Video 5

Video 6

With the cost of digital cameras declining each day, and the ability to instantly print these photos, this technique of community participation (from youth to adults) in identifying community problems and or issues and allowing for multiple interpretations of what the photo is about and why it is important to start the discussion on how it can be resolved.