In Business, Creating Sustainable Enterprises & Communities

REVITALIZING STREETSCAPES VIA GREEN MAPS

In Business, November-December, 2004, Vol. 26, No. 6, p. 22

Mapa Verde Cuba brings tourists and residents together to celebrate Cuba's diverse culture - and the local environment.

COLORFUL graffiti lettering announcing the Proyecto Comunitario Muraleando (Community Mural Making Project) welcomes newcomers to Lawton, a low income neighborhood on the outskirts of Havana, Cuba. The influence of Muraleando makes an outsider's first visit an overwhelmingly dream-like experience: brightly painted murals of cultural icons, nature, poetry and designs cover 15 blocks of walls, houses, and schools. Stone carvings, metalwork installations, telephone pole sculptures, and gardens also line the streets. The many styles draw on Cuba's diverse culture, the Santeria religion and images of everyday life, as portrayed by collaborating local and foreign artists and activists. This exuberant revitalization has spawned monthly street festivals, where theater, hip-hop, singing, and dance performances draw tourists and community people together. Most recently, this multimedia public art project has become a medium for celebrating the local environment through the Mapa Verde Cuba (Green Map Cuba) program.
Using the Green Map System, an adaptable ecocultural mapmaking methodology shared by over 250 communities worldwide, residents are surveying, reclaiming and restoring Lawton's natural and cultural resources. Local residents were introduced to the project and its unique visual language of Green Map Icons through a Mapa Verde workshop conducted by the nationwide branch of the global Green Map network. Local elementary school students have joined with a senior citizen group to lead the project, aided by an ecologist and the neighborhood doctor. Through the process, they are “exploring home from a fresh perspective and learning to communicate their collaborative findings in an engaging, direct way.”
The Green Map System was introduced in Cuba in May 1998, when founding director Wendy Brawer took part in an international conference on sustainable development. Cuban ecologists and environmental educators appreciated the Green Map System's potential to empower communities and share their sustainability work with the world. In 1999, the first projects were initiated, and at the end of 2000, the Mapa Verde Cuba national network took shape. Today, there are 75 diverse urban and rural projects underway in 11 of Cuba's 14 provinces.
Mapa Verde Cuba is a project of the Centro Felix Varela, an NGO that offers workshops on sustainable development, conflict mediation and ethics. The locally-run map projects are based at institutions including schools, neighborhood councils, environmental and senior citizen centers. Participants range in age from 5 to 85; over 750 students from across the island have taken part. Participants do more than create maps-they restore blighted waterways, petition public officials, organize field trips, and exchange cultural experiences with other Cubans and the global Green Map network.
In its new video documentary, Gotica a Gotica (Drop by Drop), Mapa Verde interviews several participants and documents the impacts of the mapmaking process throughout Cuba. These hand-drawn Green Maps have galvanized neighborhood volunteer action: vacant lots have been turned into vegetable gardens, for example, and new community centers have been founded. One community's Green Map project planted hundreds of new street trees and established green roofs and patio gardens. Student mapmakers identified a dangerous bridge on the way to their school, then organized volunteers to replace it. The experience reinforces community and environmental values while developing participants' skills and imparting a sense of lasting ownership.
Cuba's Mapa Verde emphasizes practical support of real people in real places addressing economic, social and environmental issues. In Lawton, the Mapa Verde project has resulted in a number of different maps with special themes. Elder residents collaborated on block-by-block research for a Green Map emphasizing health conditions and neighborhood history. For another map, elementary school students compiled information on flora, fauna, and soil conditions of a hill behind their school. Muraleando artists then transformed the resulting map into a street mural, making the Green Mappers' findings accessible without expending resources on printing and distribution. The muralists have painted realistic visions of proposed improvements alongside the Green Map, including better housing, urban gardens, safer parks and a ballfield, depicted next to Green Map Icons representing beloved public artworks. With dedication and perseverance, the project has bolstered sorely needed initiatives and directly addressed community concerns. The Lawton Muraleando Mapa Verde team has grown from 7 to 80 members in a single year, demonstrating that even with limited resources, it is possible to understand and impact the neighborhood culture.
In 44 countries around the world, Green Mapmaking helps cultivate personal empowerment, promotes cultural diversity and encourages a movement to address environmental concerns. Collaborating Mapmakers from the global South (particularly Cuba and Brazil) have expressed a clear interest in working with the North to deepen the dialogue about our common future. The Canadian-based Mapas Verdes Learning and Vision Project was formed in 2003 with the belief that the profound international human rights and environmental issues we face require innovative, inter-cultural learning and planning tools to encourage dialogue and sustainable development throughout the hemisphere. Currently this network is developing “Mapping Our Common Ground,” a booklet of activities and low-cost resources for community and Green Mapmaking, to be published in English, Spanish, and Portuguese in 2005.
Due to the tightening of the U.S. embargo and recent Cuban currency shifts, Americans have been prevented from seeing how far Cubans have progressed toward sustainable development with so few resources. For example, because Cuba is unable to buy the oil, fertilizers and pesticides necessary for modern industrial agriculture, organic agriculture has flourished. Cubans have turned to oxen and bicycles to replace machinery and farm transportation, and are successfully growing healthy food wherever people live-on urban school grounds, vacant lots, roof tops, and patios. Their model of organic urban agriculture can be emulated in other countries concerned about food security, or where fresh produce makes the difference between bare subsistence and vigorous health.

For more information on Mapa Verde Cuba and ways to support them and the Community Green Mapping booklet project, please contact Ground Works Canada (info@gworks.ca), or Mapa Verde Cuba at mapaverde@cfv.org.cu. Download their reports and more at GreenMap.org.