Illustrating a Call to Action for More Equitable and Sustainable Cities
The World Resources Institute taps Graphicacy to visualize a crisis and potential solutions for a wide audience
Each day, services that make modern life possible are easily taken for granted. A stable electrical current keeps the temperature comfortable in your home. The unlimited supply of tap water flowing into your home is invaluable for hygiene, hydration, and meal preparation. Your own personal vehicle or proximity to public transit gives you access to jobs and opportunities.
These services are not the norm for those living in the global South. More than 1.2 billion people — or one in every three urban-dwellers on the planet — lack daily access to essential urban services. The massive worldwide urban services divide creates a dangerous and unjust burden on underserved individuals, damages the environment, and holds back the potential of whole cities and nations.
To help close this gap, the World Resources Institute’s (WRI) Ross Center for Sustainable Cities recently unveiled their Seven Transformations for More Equitable and Sustainable Cities. The report, which paints a picture of the urban services divide and presents strategies for global cities to deliver equitable access to urban services, is WRI’s flagship report for 2021.
WRI entrusted Graphicacy with the monumental task of applying a visual context to the myriad problems and potential solutions around the urban services divide. Across a multi-month project timeline, Graphicacy developed informational graphics and interactive scrollytelling passages to help policymakers and other stakeholders understand the magnitude of the problems and why solving them must be a priority.
Making global inequity a human story
Less than a decade into tracking progress toward achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, WRI came to an inescapable conclusion: Inequity was actually growing in many cities around the world, particularly in Asia, Africa, and South America. This revelation was the impetus behind the Seven Transformations report.
While all signs pointed to growing inequity, WRI needed clear, easily understood visualizations to tell a story around where inequities exist and potential actions for mitigating them.
“If you can illustrate what it looks like to go through life in the city without access to water or transportation, then you bring that idea to life,” said Anjali Mahendra, director of global research at WRI’s Ross Center for Sustainable Cities.
In some cities in Africa, for example, people must wait in line two to three hours for water, which they need to make last for three days before they go back for more. This burden largely falls on women, who are then unable to do other productive work.
“That’s an individual person’s experience, but the burdens are handed down from generation to generation,” Mahendra said. “We wanted to convey the weight of the burden in graphics to demonstrate the severity of the urban services divide.”
Illuminating critical concepts
Graphicacy and WRI worked together at first in-person and then virtually during the pandemic to ensure the visualizations did justice to both the research findings and the complex layers contributing to the inequities.
Designing a graph that depicted the urban services divide was the first step. Graphicacy then developed a scrollytelling narrative to explain the graph and put it into context.
“The graph shows you all the things some people have to do to get through the day,” said Carni Klirs, Graphicacy’s associate creative director and lead data visualization designer. “The time and effort people in these cities need just to get to a job, get clean water, or acquire electricity compounds and gets wider every day, every week, every year.”
Other scrollytelling elements illustrate the benefits of upgrading informal settlements to improve living conditions and environmental sustainability. The graphic evolves to show how a series of progressive improvements can have large and lasting impacts.
Graphicacy partnered with illustrator Ben Oldenburg to bring this graphic to life, with an isometric style city scene. Ben also helped produce vignettes for all seven recommended transformations.
“He was able to really articulate the nuances and relationships of the issues, like how electricity is necessary for making a living,” Mahendra said.
Connecting with a broad audience
“A lot of people who make infrastructure decisions don’t come from the front lines and they aren’t technical people,” Mahendra said. “They come from varied backgrounds and their expertise is usually in specific subjects. That’s why it’s so important to have engaging graphics and powerful visuals. You need to quickly make your point with many different people.”
WRI leveraged the visualizations to explain concepts of urban inequity in the online version of their report as well as the 224-page printed version. The communications team at WRI used them as part of an integrated marketing campaign to expand the reach of their message across numerous social media channels.
Clarifying issues like the urban services divide for decision makers reflects Graphicacy’s commitment to helping address the world’s most important issues through data visualization and other forms of visual storytelling. Graphicacy has also collaborated with partners such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, USAID, and CGIAR’s Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security to help find long-term solutions to complex, deep-seated problems.
Graphicacy partners with clients to tell engaging stories with data. Graphicacy’s team combines storytelling, thoughtful human-centered design and deep technical capabilities to build and deploy strategic, data-rich digital projects. Graphicacy’s team has created data visualizations and infographics for top-tier organizations and companies, domestically and internationally, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank, the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, the Center for American Progress, the Anti-Defamation League and many others.
