THE GEOGRAPHY OF HOPE

As I listened to their presentations and saw their work, I had a moment: I’d found my people.

This book had its seeds in 2011, when I found myself at Esri’s annual User Conference in San Diego, California. There, with 15,000 self-proclaimed map geeks, I was astonished to discover a whole community of people who understood the power of visuals to create understanding and trust—and to solve the world’s pressing problems.

I went into this book knowing I was writing about what a friend (and many in the GIS industry) call “the most important technology that people have never heard of.” People who knew geographic information systems mapping and technology gushed about how it made them and their organizations smarter or richer. Yet most people I told about the book had no idea what GIS technology does.

GIS has never been just about the technology for me—and it doesn’t have to be for you. The Geography of Hope shows how GIS helps people, communities, and organizations succeed and prosper.

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 a way to improve K-12 education. This book puts human faces to GIS mapping and technology in a real-world way that hasn’t been done before.

Available at bookstores everywhere including:  IndiePubs ,  Amazon ,  Barnes & Noble , and  Bookshop .

GIS is a tool kit—and we’ll dip into some of that, but the nine very different chapters in this book have a common thread: the choices exceptional people have made about how to use GIS tools to change the world.

Meet those people through the chapter excerpts below. And get inspired to read their full stories in  The Geography of Hope. 

Keep scrolling to read the chapter excerpts in numerical order. Explore the map—or use the navigation bar—to choose your own reading adventure.

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.

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.

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.

Jesus Garcia and I meet at Panorama Park on the east side of Bakersfield, looking toward the Sierra Nevada range. It’s 38°F and a rare blizzard would hit Southern California the next day, making national news. He sweeps his right arm slowly, as if painting the valley of scrub brush and oil rigs below, and says, “Welcome to Bakersfield, one of the most racist places in California.” He pauses. “It’s just wrong—and it’s been that way for more than a century.” He brings that kind of heat when he lists all the grievances committed in a place that’s 65 percent people of color—but dominated politically by a White power structure that he and others call The Machine.

In 2022, Garcia saw a once-in-a-lifetime chance to reshape Bakersfield’s political landscape. A proud dad in a father-daughter duo of GIS experts, he put in seven years at the US Census Bureau. So he knew his way around the data showing who would be likely to vote and where they lived. He would use that data to build GIS-based maps in Kern County and its largest city, Bakersfield. But this venture wasn’t like the 30-plus other projects on his resume. As a consultant for the iconic Dolores Huerta, Cesar Chavez’s farmworker organizing partner, he’d be part of a home-grown reckoning—if it succeeded. And he’d be in it with his daughter, Sophia.

From Prague to Nairobi to Berkeley—and even from the skies—we’re seeing the democratization of data. It may be the most potent GIS innovation in the last decade. People and communities see their visions come to life, maps are reworked on the fly, and common ground grows.

In Bakersfield, Jesus Garcia made a big bet on his own brand of community mapping: political redistricting that would create “fair lines,” a path to power for long-neglected neighborhoods on the seven-person city council.

In August 2011, Letitia “Tish” Long had been in her job as director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) for only a week. One morning, two analysts and their division head insisted on seeing her right away. They had no appointment. It was urgent. Then, Long said, “They told me, ‘We think we may have found Osama bin Laden.’”

A 2011 article in The Atlantic, “The Little-Known Agency that Helped Kill bin Laden,” revealed a striking amount of detail about NGA’s role. The Atlantic described super-sophisticated facial recognition software and 3D imagery, among other technological tools of the spy trade. It was a rare moment in the media spotlight for NGA, the most important intelligence agency you’ve probably never heard of.

The US’s largest, most mission-critical user of geo-spatial information makes maps that show every road, mountaintop, airfield, and undersea trench in the world.

While the 14,000-person NGA works mostly in the shadows, it wields power and knowledge. NGA brings something special to the table: geography. Its visuals represent an underlying belief that every morsel of data can be tied to a physical location—and that geography can be a tool to integrate information to help other agencies “understand human intention,” the riddle they’re asked to solve.

Elephants can be lousy ambassadors for conservation. Just ask Francis Nzioka, a farmer in southeast Kenya. “I can’t sleep. I hear the elephants all night long,” he says as he strides across the plowed rows on his five acres of red, iron-rich soil. He’s just waiting for the first big rain so he can plant his beans and black-eyed peas, but that’s also when his worries grow.

His problem is that his land is the first stop for elephants in search of water when they wander off the neighboring Chalongo Conservancy. Last year, elephants uprooted his fruit orchard, made a happy meal of his crops, and trampled fences he can barely afford to replace. Despite all that, Nzioka still calls himself a conservationist, and the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) helps support his farm on which he’s also a good neighbor to elephants. AWF supplied him with boxes of bees that hang from his fences every 10 yards, because elephants really, really don’t like bees.

In the 1800s, White colonial overlords drove “fortress conservation,” the creation of protected areas in Africa. The colonists walled off lands from Indigenous communities and evicted millions, while ensuring their own ability to hunt big game or to exploit the forests, animal skins, or ivory tusks that created European fortunes. Since the independence movements of the 1960s, and some before then, African nations have managed their own lands. But Western funding and traditional fortress conservation still guide much of the continent’s approach.

Africa has put the world on notice that it will set new terms: it will find a way to protect forests, jungles, savannas, and coastlines while raising the standard of living through city-building, agriculture, and ensuring that economic rewards can flow to all. It will do conservation for Africans, by Africans.

Kaddu Sebunya, AWF chief executive officer, preaches that gospel, using GIS tools to shape a new brand of conservation.

He’s not the first African leader to stress the importance of partnerships and communities. In 2003, Nelson Mandela said, “I see no future for parks unless they address the needs of communities as equal partners in their development.”

Flying a mile high, 65 miles north of New York City, pilot Mehmet Bulut says his iPad screen looks like a Pac-Man game. “Right there, the green lines with the loops, that’s us,” he says. Moving at 160 knots, we’re chomping 50-mile-long rows in the sky, with loops at each end that show where we’ve done 180-degree turns to chase new lines. There’s even a cute icon of our plane.

A complex camera system the size of a small refrigerator squats in the back of Bulut’s twin-engine Cessna. It whirs and tilts and snaps pictures as its gyroscopes keep it level. Jammed into a tiny seat next to it, I feel like R2-D2’s wingman. Directly below, in the belly of the plane, eight lenses are arranged in a disc about two feet in diameter.

The 45 crews who fly these planes create one of the most ambitious, little-known geospatial projects in the world. They’re photographing nearly every inch of the continental United States and Hawaii—and 33 other countries—for a most unlikely customer, the 400-year-old insurance industry.

GIS has already become a critical technology for businesses ranging from Chick-Fil- A to FedEx. And a range of players are making big bets that broad adoption by the massive insurance industry could trigger a domino effect. Banking, utilities, energy—major sectors that make up much of the global economy—could also save money and create efficiencies with a GIS makeover.

GIS data is already helping to determine who gets home loans and where solar farms and affordable housing get built. It helps keep supply chains humming, makes sure packages get to doorsteps on time, and helps decide where the next Starbucks will pop up. But changing a behemoth like the insurance industry shows how GIS is transforming global commerce.

Mosquitoes chew at Dr. Bruce Aylward on a soaking, humid Saturday night under an awning at the airport in Dakar, Senegal. He’s been summoned from neighboring Ghana just the day before by Margaret Chan, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), a UN agency. She needs him in New York on Monday to tell the world’s leaders at the UN how WHO plans to stop Ebola in its tracks in 2014.

Ebola is a special kind of terrifying. With an initial mortality rate of 90 percent, the disease makes headlines for its horrible symptoms and gruesome deaths: victims die bleeding from the eyes and ears. Thousands fall sick every week across West Africa; bodies lie in the streets of national capitals. Ban Ki-moon, former secretary-general of the UN, wants to step up the response.

This is what Aylward does. From measles to polio to Ebola to Zika and, eventually, COVID-19, in his role as senior adviser to the director-general of WHO, he’s always one phone call away from parachuting into a chaotic public health emergency and creating a focused, effective response.

At every step of a career that touches dozens of countries, his first question has been, “Where are the maps?” That makes him the true believer that every GIS professional wants to work with.

Go to any GIS conference, and you’ll hear this lament: “If only my bosses’ boss understood the power of GIS.” Aylward is that leader, the C-suite advocate who teams up with a GIS visionary, a partnership that you’ll find at almost any organization that really leans into GIS. But GIS geniuses alone can’t change an organization. It takes a leader like Aylward who speaks up for the power of place.

While police and fire departments have used GIS for decades,  Berkeley’s Transparency Hub  reflects what may be the US’s most advanced, transparent accounting of what the police do, how they do it, and where it all happens.

“Berkeley is truly the exception rather than the rule,” Judge LaDoris Hazzard Cordell, a nationally known expert on police-community relations, told me.

“If you look across this country at the more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies, you will find, almost without exception, that any time there is a move toward transparency and policing, the rank and file—i.e., the unions—oppose it vigorously. This may be the only department in this country that’s doing this.”

A retired Superior Court judge, Cordell knows policing. She served for five years as the independent police auditor for the city of San Jose, California, as well as vice-provost at Stanford University.

The birth of the Transparency Hub goes back to the explosive summer of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis shined a searing hot light—long overdue in the eyes of many—on police practices across the US. Angry marchers demanded alternatives to the quasi-military approach that has defined so many police departments for the better part of a century. “Defund the police” defined one extreme, spurring a Blue Lives Matter backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement on the other side. In between, communities across the country were searching for a new model.

In Berkeley, as in many other communities, that meant shifting from a warrior model of policing to a guardian model. It’s a national movement, but the guardian concept has met stiff resistance in many departments. Simply put, instead of viewing every interaction as a possible threat, each engagement becomes an opportunity to build trust. It’s a huge change in emphasis. Rather than fighting crime on hostile streets, officers see themselves as protecting the community.

The mantra of geospatial applications says, “Everything happens somewhere—and place always matters.” I’m not sure that’s as true as the zealots say. But place is absolutely, positively everything when you find yourself standing in a minefield.

Innocent civilians around the world need the expert teams and organizations that rid the world of the deadly debris of war. In Zimbabwe, elephants are stepping on land mines that were buried nearly five decades ago. For every mine-free Mozambique, there’s a nightmare like Ukraine. Experts say it could take three decades to remove land mines, improvised explosive devices, and unexploded ordnance there. All of these places are vivid reminders that generations of warriors have dropped bombs, sabotaged farmers’ fields, and secured their battle lines with cheap anti-personnel explosives in more than a third of the world’s countries. The professionals have a term for the results: “VODs,” victim-operated deaths.

Sophisticated GIS-based maps identify the hot spots and help eliminate costly false-positive locations. Mine-removal veterans who worked from tattered, wall-size maps marvel at GIS-driven data so detailed that 13,000 villages in Afghanistan have been mapped over the past 20 years. In Sudan, infrared images from drones show the heat signatures of metal mines that stay warm as deserts cool. And in early 2022, people started streaming back to Ukrainian towns, leaving photographic breadcrumbs on social media that were collected with the help of artificial intelligence tools. The result: a GIS roadmap to where still-lethal Russian munitions were likely to be found.

Educational systems worldwide have figured out that the future requires STEM skills, including coding. But you can scour the planet to find K-12 systems that have grasped the power of teaching with GIS, and you’ll mostly come up empty-handed.

Or you’ll end up in England, where teachers and students benefit from a system that mandates and supports GIS-informed coursework.

I hadn’t looked at GIS as a contact sport until I met Nick Whittingham’s class of 13-year-old girls in Bromley, England. Excited teens lean on the backs of seated classmates. They reach over each other’s shoulders to point out where to click on the map to find Ben Nevis, the highest point in the United Kingdom. One girl’s screen is totally off track. Her laptop shows a whiskey distillery of the same name. Teachers who use GIS in K-12 classrooms see that engagement, the head-first dive into content. They say their students ask better questions with broader vocabularies, even guiding their own learning.

There’s not a lot of global data to back up the rave reviews from GIS-fluent teachers. But they’ll introduce you to students whose lives have been changed by exposure to GIS. They’ll tell you that building map layers, from demographics to food deserts, makes students more aware of how data can be used—or manipulated, especially on social media.

Teaching K-12 students with GIS has plenty of challenges, and its potential has barely been tapped, but the evangelists will tell you that GIS maps have turned what had been flat, five-minute lectures into question- and insight-filled, 50-minute explorations that help students understand the world around them. And every teacher we talked to pointed out that learning GIS opens a gateway to a whole universe of occupations—and, as savvy secondary schoolers know, university admission.

It was never on my bingo card to spend two-plus years reporting, photographing, and writing a book. But hope and optimism are seductive that way. Given the state of democracy and the world in 2024, they’ve never been more important.