Community-based data for a new taxonomy of abandoned places

Abandoned places are common "everyday" landscape elements whose characteristics are not always adequately known. It is necessary to activate innovative knowledge-making tools to understand the complexity of these places in order to fill the lack of information concerning their characteristics and the relationship between their fragility and the repercussions on physical space. Open data represent a great opportunity to produce new knowledge both for the preservation of a vulnerable heritage and to support urban regeneration processes. Through open-data participatory mapping actions, the community knowledge can easily emerge in a structured way. Official digital sources are often unable to adapt and upgrade processes of place knowledge making. For this reason, a set of digital infrastructural facilities must be conceived and implemented, adopting the most advanced information technologies, in order to produce open-source, interoperable and interactive Dataset. The digital infrastructure requires a wide variety of heterogeneous data sets, collected and managed to remain open both for endless sharing and for technical verification actions. Openstreetmap is an emblematic example of a re-adaptable tool for mapping abandoned places: the modular depth of its geodatabase allows it to be customized with great ease. Using this tool, the information is made accessible to a large community to be used and shared.