The PetaJakarta.org project has developed pioneering software to harness social media as a real time tool for both reporting and communicating vital information about flood conditions in the city of Jakarta.
Peta Jakarta
The PetaJakarta.org project has enabled faster response and a greater understanding of flood situations as they occur. In the long term, this research will form the foundation for better understanding of flood events in order to develop new adaptation options for megacity infrastructure in developing nations in south-east Asia; which are threatened by increased rainfall, rising sea levels and exponentially increasing populations.
PetaJakarta.org is a research project led by the SMART Infrastructure Facility, University of Wollongong, in collaboration with the Jakarta Emergency Management Agency (BPBD DKI Jakarta) and Twitter Inc. Financial support from the University of Wollongong Global Challenges Program enabled a critical advancement of the research collaboration.
This project enabled Jakarta’s citizens to report the locations of flood events using the social media network Twitter, thereby contributing to a web-based, publicly accessible, real-time map of flood conditions at PetaJakarta.org. these data were used by BPBD DKI Jakarta to cross-validate formal reports of flooding from traditional data sources, supporting the creation of information for flood assessment, response, and management in real-time.
In October 2014, eight members of BPBD DKI Jakarta travelled from Jakarta to Wollongong, Australia, to participate in a 10 day intensive research workshop at the SMART Infrastructure Facility. Not only did this workshop built trust between the members of the respective partner organizations, it also allowed for a more considered approach to the software and platform development.
PetaJakarta.org has demonstrated social media’s valuable niche within the disaster risk management information ecosystem; as an operational tool capable of providing decision support at the various spatial and temporal scales required by the different actors within city, PetaJakarta.org offers an innovative and inexpensive method for the crowdsourcing of time-critical situational information in disaster scenarios.
Publications
- Turpin E. (forthcoming Jan 2016) Figured Ground: On the Anthropocene in Asia. Deleuze Studies, Special Issue on the Anthropocene, eds. H. Stark and A. Saldanha.
- Turpin E., Holderness T. (submitted) Harnessing Twitter to Support Flood Detection, Response, and Recovery in Jakarta, Indonesia. Social Media for Government Services, eds. S. Nepal, C. Paris, D. Georgakopoulos.
- Turpin E. (forthcoming Oct 2015) Cosmic Inclemency. What is Energy? eds. Sanford Kwinter and Kiel Moe. Barcelona and New York: Actar.
- Turpin E., Holderness T. (forthcoming September 2015) Constructing Data Polities.Presentation to the session ‘Producing Urban Life: Fragility and Socio-Cultural Infrastructures,’ RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2015.
- Turpin E. (forthcoming September 2015) Exhuming Jakarta. Presentation to the session ‘Verticality and the Anthropocene: Politics & Law of the Subsurface,’ RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2015.
- Turpin E., Springer A.-S. (2015) Reverse Hallucinations in the Archipelago.Presentation to the 2015 International Conference of Historical Geographers at the Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers), London,UK.
- Turpin, E. Davis, H., eds. (2015) Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments & Epistemologies. London: Open Humanities Press.
- Ogie R., Holderness T., Dunbar M., Turpin E. (submitted) Spatio-Topological Network Modelling for Urban Hydrological Infrastructure Risk Assessments.
- Holderness T., Turpin E., Berryman B., Jones B. (submitted) PetaJakarta.org: A Multistable Geographical Information System for Flood Reporting via Social Media.
- Dun, O. has been invited to contribute to a Special Issue on ‘Relocation after disasters – permanent and temporary options under examination’ for the International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment (IJDRBE). She will likely contribute a paper in relation to flood evacuationdecision-making amongst residents of informal settlements in Jakarta following a further data collection trip to Jakarta in 2016 as per UOW GC Year 2 funding.
Media
- 4 Ways Mapping Has Transformed Public Services in the Global South
- Making smart cities work for people. No 1: Crowdsourcing flood maps in Jakarta
- Who makes a smart city? – livechat
- UOW researchers named in International Red Cross World Disasters Report 2015
- Crowd-Mapping Jakarta's Flood Problem Via Twitter (Because Jakartans Love To Tweet
- Be a global urban innovator! A call for the world's best ideas to make our cities better
- How tweeting about floods became a civic duty in Jakarta
- Jakarta: A city on the edge of a social media revolution
Researchers
- Dr Tomas Du Chemin Holderness, EIS (ECR)
- Dr E Turpin, EIS (ECR)
- A/Prof Rodney Clarke, BAL
- Dr Olivia Dun, ASSH (ECR)
