Flood-Resilient Cities: Visualizing Community-Centered Urban Solutions

2019

This visualization challenge tackles escalating flood risks in East African coastal cities, focusing on Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar. It engages emerging data scientists and urban planners to create community-centered visualizations that translate complex flood data into actionable insights for municipal authorities and local residents.

The challenges span waste management and flood prevention, historical flood analysis, and community risk communication, addressing resilience from municipal planning to ward-level action. Participants develop technical skills in multi-scale spatial and temporal data visualization, coupled with domain expertise in urban flood management, service delivery, and risk communication.

Working with authentic datasets from partner organizations, teams produce innovative visual tools that enhance flood preparedness and response across governance scales. The event fosters a comprehensive skill set in stakeholder-focused visualization and integrated flood resilience, promoting solutions that link waste management, flood history, and community empowerment for sustainable urban flood risk reduction.

Location:

Dar es Salaam | Zanzibar West

Challenge descriptions:

Communicate risks and hazards to local communities via visualisations

Local urban communities are often the ones suffering the most from repeated floods. Thus, communicating knowledge of the floods to the communities, and helping them to develop coping strategies with the floods is very important. Maps and data visualizations could be very useful in this task. This theme seeks for data visualization solutions, which can help local communities to better understand the risks associated with floods, and to improve their capacity to communicate and plan different coping strategies against floods in the future. The users of this information are the local communities, sub-ward and Ward leaders. Visualisation size for this theme: Only one ward to be selected either from Dar es Salaam or Zanzibar for the challenge.

Year: 2019

Tools used: 25

Location: Dar es Salaam

Story of past floods for better situation analysis

Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar City experience destructive floods every year. For example, in 2015 and 2017 unusually intense rainfalls led to severe flash floods in Dar es Salaam, which caused losses of life, damages to the properties, and major disruption to the new Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system. Both cities suffer from the lack of proper situation analysis and action plan before and during the rainy seasons. This theme seeks for data visualization solutions, which would tell the story of the flooding (choose Dar es Salaam or Zanzibar), and support authorities in making better situation analysis of the floods based on knowledge of the past floods and their impacts in the cities. The users of the visualization are local communities members and Municipalities. Visualisation size for this theme: Only one Municipality to be selected either from Dar es Salaam or Zanzibar for the challenge.

Year: 2019

Tools used: 16

Location: Dar es Salaam

Solid waste collection plan for Tanzanian cities

Planning proper solid waste management is a challenge for rapidly growing cities. During the rains, waste blocks the drainage and causes severe flooding, especially in informal settlements. There is a need for cities to organize their waste management more efficiently and identify potential locations and strategy for solid waste collection. This challenge seeks visualizations of solid waste collection points, their placement and collection strategy. The users of the information are municipalities and solid waste collection companies. Visualisation size for this theme: Only one Municipality to be selected either from Dar es Salaam or Zanzibar for the challenge.

Year: 2019

Tools used: 15

Location: Dar es Salaam

Skills development | Work with data sets | open-access learning materials | Research and Innovation

209+

Young people participated

30+

Geospatial Data Used

List of Challenges used:

Dar es Salaam

Communicate risks and hazards to local communities via visualisations

Dar es Salaam

Story of past floods for better situation analysis

Dar es Salaam

Solid waste collection plan for Tanzanian cities

Developed Solutions

Dar es Salaam

Communicate risks and hazards to local communities via visualisations

Dar es Salaam

Story of past floods for better situation analysis

Dar es Salaam

Solid waste collection plan for Tanzanian cities

Dar es Salaam

Visualizing drainage bottleneck locations.

Dar es Salaam

Integration of different type of data to identify challenges through urban planning

Dar es Salaam

Visualization of urban tree distributions and its importance for urban forestry management.

Experts

Partners

Government Institutions

General Guidelines

Data Visualisation Challenge is an opportunity for students and young professionals to turn raw data into powerful visualization solutions that highlight climate risks and urban resilience. By working with open datasets and user-friendly tools, participants will learn how to transform information into maps, charts, and interactive visuals that can support better decision-making. The challenge encourages creativity, collaboration, and the use of open-source technologies, while building practical skills that are highly relevant in today’s data-driven world.

Geospatial Data

All the data can be downloaded from the Climate Risk Database. Or you can contact your mentors from the University partners who can help you on how to get the needed data.

Preferred Softwares

Under this visualisation challenge, you are allowed to use any open source softwares to make your visualisation. Here we list few softwares: Data Studio, Leaflet, Mapbox, Quantum GIS, Geonode, U Map, and or Open Refine.

General Documents and data repositories

Tanzania Urban Resilience Program Annual Report (.pdf).
Ramani Huria Website:
Ramani Huria 1.0 Atlas:
OpenStreetMap: (The data here can be downloaded using export tools: you need to have OpenStreetMap account)
Climate Risk Database for Resilience Academy Website:

Do you want to ask a question?

If you have any question about Resilience Academy Data Visualization Challenge, feel free to contact us through our Contact Us Page

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