Your Guide to Community Mapping

Community mapping helps us better understand how people experience and interact with their local parks. In this resource, we offer practical tips for conducting community mapping projects focused on local parks, designed to collect qualitative and quantitative data from residents to better understand park usage, community strengths, and feelings of nature connection and well-being. 

Community Mapping for Local Parks

Community mapping is a collaborative process in which local residents come together to create a shared understanding of their neighbourhood by collecting fine-grained information about services, amenities, strengths, and opportunities. The practice collects information and stories that provide insight into how space is used and what gives a place meaning, relying on the lived experiences of everyday citizens to paint a picture of the neighbourhood. 

The direct and deep nature of this engagement process has the potential to promote stewardship and encourage community members to become advocates for their communities. 

Why Do we Use Community Mapping for Local Parks? 

• You don’t know what you don’t know. Gathering data on how the community interacts with the space starts with understanding their daily experiences. Understanding how local parks are used inside and out requires listening well to their users.
• It’s a tool for facilitating ongoing conversations. The goal is to build relationships, not just extract information. Success is measured by people getting involved in a variety of capacities and building reciprocal relationships with community members.
• Measuring progress is a big task. Collecting both qualitative and quantitative data from the outset creates a touchpoint for future reflection. 

1. To understand how a local park contributes to residents’ health, well-being and nature connection. 
2. To learn from residents about community assets and opportunities, including how they envision themselves getting involved in their local park. 
3. To collect data on how well local residents are connected to nature, in order to inform future park research and compare across Canada. 

This toolkit covers three approaches to community mapping: historical and demographic analysis to contextualize the local area over time, in-person community mapping activities, such as mapping key features in the park and sentiment analysis, to engage residents directly, and a nature connection survey (conducted online or in-person) to gather detailed usage data and sociodemographic insights. 

1) Historical and Demographic Analysis 

Prior to conducting surveys and engagement activities in the park, it’s important to learn who lives in the community and how these demographics have changed over time. Reflect on the history of the community and park to understand how the physical park space has come to be, who has been included and who has been excluded from accessing the park’s benefits. 

Demographic Mapping

Create a map of the neighbourhoods surrounding the park.

• Include parks/trails/neighbourhoods/major roadways/etc., within 500m of the park.
• Map sociodemographic variables at the census tract scale or neighbourhood scale. Depending on the city, see what information is available on open data portals.
• Result: Maps displaying the local community and sociodemographic variables relevant to the project.

Tracking Demographic Changes

Create tables/charts of demographic changes over time.

• For example, how did newcomer populations change in the 2011, 2016 and 2021 census years? How can we anticipate this neighbourhood changing in the future?
• Result: Data tables and charts/visualizations of demographic changes over time.

Tip: For demographic mapping and tracking demographic changes, consider partnering with a research institution to complete these analyses, i.e. Purpose Analytics or a local university.

Understanding Local History

Dig into the history of the neighbourhood and park.

• Using online search, learn more about the park, neighbourhood, local communities, events, and key organizations/people
  • Create a list of blog posts, news media, etc., that refer to the park
• Consider visiting the city archives (i.e. Toronto Archives, Vancouver Archives, Montreal Archives, Calgary Archives, Halifax Archives) to uncover more about the park that will help form a stronger understanding of the local context
• Result: 1-2 pages of compiled information, narratives, links and additional resources about the history of the park and surrounding communities. 

Create a Timeline (optional)

Build a timeline with milestones and impactful events for the park/neighbourhood to yield insights into past, existing and future community needs and challenges.

• Adapted from High Line Network’s Community First Toolkit
• Detailed instructions – download a PDF with timeline instructions and tips.

Tip: To create a timeline, consider partnering with local heritage organizations. Try searching online for “[your municipality] heritage organization.” 

Outcomes: 

• Create a small package of materials about the park to be used in partnership, research and evaluation, impact measurement and reporting activities. This sets the stage for future involvement in the park. 
• Use local histories to frame conversations with potential partners and to better understand community needs. 

2) In-person Community Mapping

This section outlines a series of in-person engagement activities designed to better understand the local community, park preferences and challenges, feelings of nature connection and well-being connected to the park. The activities also serve as a method of building community involvement and interest. 

Identify Local Partners

Create a list of potential partners who are active in the community.

• Using previous neighbourhood research  as a starting point, continue to build out a list of potential partners (grassroots community groups, NGOs, service providers, park champions, etc.) who may be interested in becoming involved in park activities.
  • Ask partners on the list to review and add more active community partners. This is an iterative process and can be done over email, in an online workshop format or in person. 
• Create an inventory of upcoming events (ideally larger-scale community events) where community input can be gathered to complete the remaining activities. Prior to attending events, be sure to meet with each organization and share about the work or your group or organization.  Begin to develop a relationship before attending events.
• Share the outcome of the research with any local organizations you connect with.

Mapping Park Highlights, Challenges and Points of Nature Connection

Connect with the community to create a map of key features within the park.

• Create a simple and easy-to-read map of the park and surrounding neighbourhoods (about 500m radius from the park). Use the map created from the demographic mapping activity as a starting point.
• At park and community events, using a large-scale version of the map rolled out onto a table in the park, have community members share their experiences of the park:
  • Hand them three stickers (dots) – ask them to place a dot on the location on the map representing their favourite place (blue), an area of concern (red), and the place where they feel most connected to nature (green). Label each sticker with a number corresponding to the participant (i.e. first participants stickers should all read “1”).
  • For each sticker placed on the map, ask the participants to elaborate on why they chose that place. Facilitators should take notes corresponding with the participants number (i.e. participant #1, nature connection, feels most connected to nature at the water’s edge because…).
    

Nature Connection and Well-being Sentiment Analysis

Learn how connected community members feel to nature and how the park contributes to their well-being.

• Activity #1: On the table, have a sheet of paper that reads “In general, how connected do you feel to the natural world around you?” Place 5 jars on the table that are labelled with: I feel strongly connected to nature, I feel somewhat connected to nature, I feel neither connected to nor disconnected from nature, I feel somewhat disconnected from nature, I feel strongly disconnected from nature. Ask participants to place a marble in the jar that corresponds to their response. 
• Activity #2: On a large piece of paper that reads “When I’m in [park name] , I feel…” ask participants to write how spending time in the park makes them feel. If prompts are needed, guide participants in thinking about how the park supports their overall well-being, physical and mental health. 

Note: these activities mirror questions asked in the nature connection survey and will allow for some comparability and integration. 

Adapt to an Online Platform (optional)

To engage with hard-to-reach groups, a specific set of people/organizations, or if an in-person gathering is not feasible, the activities can be completed online.

• Create a Miro board that has the following elements:
  • Park history/timeline
  • Park maps (should be 1 per breakout room)
  • Nature connection activity (i.e. 5 squares for participants to place their “vote”)
  • Well-being activity (i.e. question prompt and space for stickies)
• Steps:
  • 1. Introduce workshop and activities
  • 2. Present park history/timeline and how it relates to our work
  • 3. Introduce concepts of nature connection and well-being
  • 4. Start timer (5 minutes) to complete two activities
  • 5. Optional share back on well-being prompt
  • 6. Enter breakout rooms to complete mapping activity
  • 7. Back to main session for share back
  • 8. Debrief and wrap-up
  • 9. Share compiled results with participants after session

Outcomes:

• Begin to build relationships with local organizations that can develop into partnerships or simply strengthen relationships with the local community. 
• Understand how a community interacts with and perceives its local parks before deeper involvement with partner organizations.
• Collect baseline data on how local parks contribute to community well-being and how our involvement can improve those benefits equitably across community members.

Read more:

• Community First Toolkit
• Making Space: Centring Equity in Planning 
• Sparking Change Evaluation Toolkit (2017)

3) Nature Connection Survey

This survey asks park visitors (or those who recently visited the park) which park spaces they used on their most recent visit, how connected to nature they feel, which spaces allow them to feel most connected to nature, and more. The survey could be used as both a baseline data collection method and as an annual survey to track changes in the park over time. 

Introduction

In the introduction, provide survey respondents with some information about your survey: 

• Who is conducting the survey
• How long the survey will take
• The goal of the survey
• How the data collected will be used
• Contact information

Survey Sections

Click here to access the list of questions.

Online Survey

There are many online tools for distributing a survey (for example, SurveyMonkey or Google Forms). The survey can be shared out through newsletters, social media and other relevant channels (i.e. other organizations active in the park) 

In-person Survey

Using the same survey as the online one, volunteer and/or staff teams will ask park visitors to complete it while they’re in the park. This can be done through tablets or printed paper surveys (someone will need to manually upload responses to your online survey tool for analysis). Steps:

1) Set target for number of surveys completed (i.e. 200)

2) Determine how many volunteers or staff will be required

3) Set up a schedule for in-person surveys that includes weekday morning, afternoon and evenings; weekend morning, afternoon and evenings

4) Host a training session for volunteers and staff 

5) Host a debriefing session after surveys are collected

• If possible, volunteers should be compensated for participation with an honourarium
• It will still be worth connecting with city staff to let them know what we are doing and ensure that our efforts do not overlap with other in-park initiatives

Outcomes:

• Understand how a broad group of park visitors experience the park and feel connected to the space and the nature within it. For an example of a survey outcome report, please see Cornerstone Parks – Park Use and Stewardship Reports
• Have baseline knowledge of the level of nature connection the park provides and which elements could improve it.