Community Green Map
Building a New Digital Green Map for Oak Bay
The development of a new, digital community green map for Oak Bay is a priority for CAOB in 2025 and 2026. In fact, the process of creating Oak Bay’s first community green map in hardcopy form in 2008 led directly to our formation as an association.
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What’s a Green Map?
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Community green maps are a world-wide movement using community-driven mapping to highlight the natural, cultural, and sustainable resources within a community. They showcase the ecological and human-made features that contribute to environmental health and sustainability and honour Indigenous territory, history, culture, and language. Green maps also serve as powerful collaborative, community-building tools, promoting sustainability, education, and community engagement, and ultimately contributing to a more resilient and vibrant environment.
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A community green map typically includes elements, such as: Parks and Natural Reserves, Community Gardens, Bicycle Paths and Walking Trails, Renewable Energy Sites, Streams, Ponds, and other water features, Recycling and Waste Management Centres, Historic and Cultural Sites and Indigenous history, culture, traditional ecological knowledge, language and place names.
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Who’s Involved in the Project?
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CAOB, along with its ReconciliACTION Oak Bay Network (ROBN) partners and others are leading this project and proposing widespread community and school engagement and Indigenous voices and participation via ROBN member organizations, schools and the UVic Living Lab Project. The platform, as with the previous print map will use the worldwide open-source green map system and icons.
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The District of Oak Bay has provided grants to make possible the work of building the digital platform and populating it through community engagement.
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New York-based world green map movement founder Wendy Brawer visited Victoria in fall 2023 for a public presentation and skills-building workshop. (Wendy is holding the CAOB T-shirt in the photo above.)
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Why Now?
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The existing, physical Oak Bay Community Green Map is 17 years old but still widely used in Oak Bay and distributed at CAOB events and at the Oak Bay Rec Centre. A living, online interactive platform will provide constantly updated information in a way that supports ongoing community building, provides valuable information about our community to residents and visitors and recognizes Lək̓ʷəŋən territory, culture and history as well as the current environment.
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A digital version of the Oak Bay green map will also allow residents and visitors to continue to share stories, photographs and videos about the things that matter most to them in our community and add new features and insights.
What’s Next?
2023 and 2024 were focused on conceptualizing and building the digital platform that will host community input and contributions. Graphical art for the map interface has been created by Songhees artist Jessica Joseph.
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2025 and 2026 will be focused on engaging with community members and organizations to populate the map.
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Chief and Council of both the Esquimalt and Songhees Nations have indicated an interest in their communities participating in the project, particularly around the use of the Lək̓ʷəŋən language on the map.
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Details about the community engagement process and events will be posted here and in the events section of the CAOB website as they become available.
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For more information, contact the Oak Bay Community Green Map project coordinator Maeve Lydon.