In this episode of 15 Minute Maps, I speak with David de Ridder, Senior Research Fellow at the University Hospital of Geneva (HUG), who specializes in spatial epidemiology and digital public health.

David shares his dream map: a next-generation routing system that doesn’t optimize for speed, but for health.
Think: a navigation app that automatically guides you through routes with less air pollution, lower noise, fewer allergens, and greater safety — subtly improving your daily environment without adding friction to your life.

Together, we explore:
• How spatial data helped track and respond to COVID-19 in Geneva
• Why tiny differences between neighbourhoods matter for public health
• The concept of exposomics — the full range of environmental factors shaping our bodies
• The promise and challenges of “passive” digital health tools
• How smarter maps could reduce stress, prevent disease, and promote healthier cities

If you're curious about the future of mapping, digital health, or how your environment shapes your well-being, this episode is packed with insights.

Ever Wondered How You’d Navigate the Ocean With No Compass, No GPS, and No Land in Sight? Well this episode once again proves the importance of maintaining indigenous knowledge.

That question led Bonner Professor John Huth, Harvard physicist and renowned member of the team that discovered the Higgs boson, into an entirely different field of research — mapping the ocean waves that Indigenous Marshallese navigators use to navigate their many atolls.

In this episode we discuss:

How Marshallese navigators sail between islands by feeling subtle changes in the direction of swells.

The challenge of turning experiential, embodied knowledge into something that can be mapped without reducing its cultural meaning.

Why he teaches a course on navigation that blends science, history, and Indigenous techniques — and why it resonates today.

How sensor data, drift measurements, and hand-drawn charts can help visualize a navigation system most of us have never encountered.

If we can map the wave structures that navigators feel, we can help preserve a knowledge system that’s at risk of disappearing — and better understand how humans read their environment.

This episode is for anyone interested in mapping, ocean science, traditional knowledge systems, or how we make sense of place.

We often talk about rebuilding after a disaster, but we leave so little thought for rthe materials needed. Have you ever thought about where all the rubble goes after a war or a flood?

That’s the question that led Guilherme Iablonovski, a geospatial data scientist at the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, to dedicate his career to mapping matter itself — from concrete and steel to the global flow of sand, food, and everything in between.

In this week’s episode of 15-Minute Maps, Guilherme joins me to talk about:
Why the world needs a “map of matter” — a way to trace what materials are where, and where they move.

How cities have a metabolism, just like living beings — taking in, storing, and expelling materials in measurable flows.

What happens to all that material when a city is bombarded or flooded — and how understanding this could make rebuilding faster, cheaper, and greener.
How consumption habits in places like Paris can have invisible footprints across the world.

And why mapping matter could be key to tracking progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — especially SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities) and SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production).

She Lost Her Home to Wildfires… and Turned It Into a Powerful Mapping Idea That Could Not Only Save Lives but Local History as Well!

Professor Brianna Pagan Corremonte - remote sensing expert, technical leader, environmentalist, and ultra marathon runner. How can you marry all these elements together into one map? Well Brianna describes her life post wildfires in southern California and the many stories she came across while supporting her neighbours during this troubling time. She wants blend aural story telling with mapping, tying place with history. Not only does she want to put forth historic data to improve response, she wants the stories of those impacted by crises to live on. As a person who lives to be out in the wild, she firmly believes that hobbying with a purpose (in this case running 100mile races) is key to ensuring we better understand the world around us.

In this very moving episode, Esperanza Ortega-Tapia describes her dream of being able to map the loss of farming land within BIPOC communities in the United States. A topic incredibly close to her heart, Esperanza not only takes us on a journey of loss of land but also, a loss of cultural heritage. Having grown up in New Mexico, picking chilies with her grandfather on their family land, she has experienced first hand how climate change and systematic oppression has driven many to abandon farming. Sadly this is a story all too common across the world, and one that Esperanza hopes she can tackle with her research int food systems.

In this episode, Guido Pizzini - Director, Business Development, Impact and Partnerships at Immap Inc. - takes us through his dream of mapping community response to climate change. This idea is driven by his reading of Landscapes of Retreat:

'...a reading of how the climate emergency lands in real places across time by paying close attention to adaptation charged with intimate, local memory'

Landscapes of Retreat, ROSETTA S. ELKIN

Preparedness is at the core of humanitarian response, built up over 100 years of crises, learning and developing capacity and techniques to ensure each time an event occurs, the response is better. But impact varies greatly depending on where an event occurs. How do we capture local knowledge? How do we transpose knowledge between regions? Is that even possible or is it really just a dream?

Guido believes a concerted and unified effort within the humanitarian realm could achieve a map that does just this.

Links

immap.org

Linked In

Landscapes of retreat

Sven Schmitz-Leuffen, GIS and Technical Solutions Lead at the International Committee of the Red Cross has a problem, how to know where and to whom should the ICRC be delivering support to? Well here is where the Gap Map comes in, a comprehensive collection of needs assessments that allow the ICRC to identify the literal 'gaps' in support. We discuss the practicalities of such a map, the pros and cons of the UN cluster system (and the potential existence of a Data Cluster), and the joys of working within the legal parametres laid out in the ICRC's mandate.

From time to time, one feels the need to break with tradition, and while this podcast has normally only dealt with planetary GIS and mapping, in this episode we go beyond our atmosphere and look up and out. Prof. Sung Huang, associate professor at the Department of Astronomy at Tsinghua University in Beijing, lets us into his universe and tells us bout his dream map - a four dimensional rendering of the universes almost infinite galactic bodies. Though the subject matter is out fo this world, Prof. Huang's perspective highlights the importance of understand the galaxy on the future of humanity and our development as a species. So come learn the importance of having dark skies, the impact satellite mega constellations have on our mental health, and why what is going on out there is so important to what is going on down here.

Links:

Dark Skies International

Interactive dark sky map

Song's experiment: The Multiplexed Survey Telescope