CMAP

Collaborative Media Advocacy Platform [CMAP] is a collaboration between local and international community organisers, urban designers, filmmakers, broadcasters, architects, researchers and residents from across Port Harcourt’s informal settlements.

We are sharing skills and technologies that allow people in marginalised communities to organise more e ectively, plan more appropriately and reach the city with their voice and vision. We collaborate with these communities as they gain a meaningful role in shaping a city that embraces them and recognises their rights. Engaging communities and government in dialogue, we promote responsive urban policy and design.

Our core programme is the Human City Project.

The Human City Project is a community-driven media, architecture, urban design and human rights initiative in Port Harcourt, Nigeria.

In 2009 the government of Rivers State, Nigeria, began a programme to demolish largely informal 'waterfront' settlements in the state capital, Port Harcourt, that are home to up to 480,000 people. Our programmes enable these communities to tell their stories on film, on air and in court, chart their reality on maps and describe their visions in urban action plans. We forge partnerships to realise these plans through neighbourhood demonstration projects and citywide strategy.

The project has taught us that residents of Port Harcourt’s informal settlements place a premium on ‘communicative spaces’, places where they can come together and talk – such as townhalls; meeting facilities, games rooms, and gardens – and also places from which they can speak up and reach out – such as radio facilities, media production spaces, performance venues. The places where people speak to each other about their cities can shape public policies and public spaces. These communicative spaces can be drivers of a new social urbanism, contributing to the vibrant look and sound of formerly overlooked and under-represented places and people.