Real-World Creative Innovation

Guia Rocinha Histórica is an online guided tour of the Rocinha favela built on the StoryMaps platform. In the project, Rocinha’s own residents narrate stories about the community’s history and local culture, making the forgotten community visible to the public and alleviating the negative impact of COVID-19 through tourism.

Many residents in the South Zone of Rio de Janeiro rely on a public transportation route to connect them to various important areas nearby. Yet it dwindled from multiple to one unreliable bus. The remaining bus driver created a WhatsApp with live updates that quickly grew to an entire community.

To prepare for the World Cup and Summer Olympics, thousands of low-income people in Rio de Janeiro were forcibly evicted. Many people ended up in Queimados, a county with poverty and violence that lacks transportation. Carlos de Oliveira changed this by showing residents how to build their own bikes.

Even after Obaid-Chinoy’s documentary won an Oscar, she realized it meant little unless the Pakistani’s affected by the social issues in the film could see it. So she and her team converted a truck into a mobile cinema that allowed the films to be shown in remote areas of Pakistan.

Although Truck Art existed in Pakistan before 2016, Truck Art Child Finder made portraits of missing children and put their relevant information on them, allowing them to be seen by people in deep rural and disconnected areas, with it even getting global attention, shedding light on the issue of missing children.

After Cyclone Komen struck Myanmar, it caused flooding and landslides in the west, making many regions inaccessible by road. So the World Health Organization and local community volunteers converted boats into mobile clinics. With locals’ navigation knowledge, they floated through to deliver essential medical care to remote communities.

In California’s impoverished Coachella Valley, where students lack internet access, the innovative “Wi-Fi on Wheels” program transformed school buses into mobile connectivity hubs. This initiative spread nationwide, especially during the pandemic, bringing essential internet access to homeless shelters, rural communities, and underserved areas, turning isolation into learning and networking opportunities.

The Bike Arte Festival is a mobile, street-level celebration that merges cycling culture and community building through art, education, and collective action. It happens every year in different low-income neighborhoods, offering residents hands-on workshops and cultural activities centered around bikes, highlighting a sustainable way of moving around and creativity.

Nuvem is a rural hack-lab that helps different local communities with their issues, such as a community not having proper access to Wi-Fi. At the same time, it teaches workshops to the residents to create and use technology to better their communities.

The project WikiMapa mobilized young residents of the Complexo do Alemão, known as wiki-reporters, to map their community using their phones and GPS. This allowed the once invisible to digital platforms like Google Maps to be visible and navigable in detail on a shared app.

In Mindanao, Philippines, the roads are narrow and unpaved, with steep slopes that make it impossible for traditional four-wheel vehicles to pass. In the absence of traditional buses or taxis, Mindanao’s rural communities adapted a two-wheel motorcycle taxi, the habal-habal, to address a community’s mobility needs.

São Paulo’s known for having the worst traffic congestion in the world. This causes it to be very dangerous for the motorcycle couriers, yet they remain unseen and undervalued. But now the project, Canal*Motoboy, allows them to post their daily realities, forming a community and creating a navigation tool.