Mapping community environmental sanitation issue using household spatial cognition: A case of Bulu Lor Subdistrict, Semarang, Indonesia

Abstract

Recently, a community in cities has played a key role in practicing an inclusive sustainable development with other stakeholders. However, the city government has a limitation in data spatial collection and documentation of urban environmental sanitation services, for instance. At the local scale, this data particularly relates to the local community knowledge and experiences. Unfortunately, the role of community as spatial data resource has not been encouraged yet. Instead, this condition has got worsened due to the lack of community spatial literacy. Nevertheless, this strive is important for data input on the planning process which illustrated how community recognizes their environmental changes. This paper attempts to build a simple mapping method based on household spatial cognition on urban environmental sanitary problems using GIS. Inductive mapping method applied to capture the community knowledge and experiences with a case study approach. In-depth interview was conducted with several key informants on Bulu Lor Subdistrict, part of North Semarang District, Indonesia. The reconstruction of household spatial cognition demonstrates transformation phase on the sanitation improvement due to community knowledge elevation on their health awareness and creation on their communal sanitation governance.