Social Mapping as a Tool to Enhance Public Participation

The paper analyzes perspectives, strategies, and procedures of participatory social mapping to diagnose and encourage public participation in local communities’ development. It shows that involving local people in mapping as experts could allow producing not only empirical data concerning the nature of territorial identity, territorial interests and public participation, but also building "zones of agreement" and residents’ involvement in their communities’ development. We describe residents’ involvement in mapping taken place in the rural communities of the Novosibirsk oblast