urban visualization projects

Only a few days since posting digital breadcrumb have been necessary to come across an interesting collection of projects that have been running for the last couple of years with the objective of visualizing/analysing various data sets that one way or another reveal activity in urban centres:

• Digital Footprinting: Uncovering Tourists with User-Generated Content: a paper published in IEEE’s Pervasive Computing exploring methods to uncover tourist movement using mobile networks data and geotagged photos. I have to say that this paper is particularly interesting given my current focus on tourism through PlanetEye
• Tracing the Visitor’s Eye: using a very large collection of geotagged images from Flickr, this project revealed patterns of tourists consuming important destinations.
• Real Time Rome: a MIT SENSEable City Lab project that created amazing views of Rome by using data on mobile phone usage.
• From Sentient to Responsive Cities: a compilation of various projects exploring the role of new technologies to gather information from the general population to uncover urban behaviour.
• Vague Terrain 13: citySCENE: includes an important collection of projects that use the urban setting as a canvas for their work, sometimes giving us a preview of the tools that will likely be used in the future to navigate the intricate geography of global cities
• Flickr Alpha Shapes: a Flickr project to reverse engineer shape files from their massive collection of geotagged photos
• Visualizar’08: Database City: a collection of projects developed during a workshop organized by MediaLab Prado, some of which had the objective of helping understand some of the processes that take place in an urban setting
• EveryBlock: is a web application that displays various sets of public records such as crime in a variety of visualizations, including maps

The experimental nature of many of these projects is obvious and suggests the early stages of a new discipline that has been labelled “Urban Computing” but could very well overlap elements of cultural anthropology and information architecture. With more projects exploring these areas a consensus for useful information will be built and it won’t be long before standard data sets are produced and maintained for cities along with their accepted visualization methods.

If you have knowledge of any other projects worth including in this list please leave a comment.