10 Examples of City Data Visualization

The complexity of the city (a diverse and constantly changing environment) generates a huge amount of data. More and more usability tools can generate, capture, store, manage, and analyze this data, which gives big data a wider range of possibilities. The openness of public data (including public transportation, traffic flow, water, waste, space usage, and business, etc.) allows these data to be transformed into more useful information than pure statistical aggregation. In the context of widespread use of mobile devices, this information helps to understand and create the social value of new apps. These apps use data to enable users to interact with the city from their own needs. In recent years, visualization technology has become an extended tool.

Below we have selected some excellent cases that use video formats or interactive networks to visualize urban life intensity data:

American traffic accidents

This is an impressive job. It collects traffic accidents on different roads in the United States from 2001 to 2009, classifies the accidents by type (pedestrian accident, driver and year, etc.), and puts all the information into one. On a map. The research team also produced a similar map of the mass shootings in Britain, whose silent tragedy was shocking.

Junk long-distance travel

This is a MIT project. The most worthy of attention is how it explains the project concept, adding location tags to different types of garbage, and the process of each type of garbage traveling several kilometers until it is finally processed. Waste management and removal is an obscure and secret system (forgotten after being thrown away). And this project helps people see and understand a more abundant process than we think of "throwing garbage".

Real-time public rental bicycle system

The map visualizes all bicycles in the London Public Rental Program. On the same website, you can also visit and check the situation in other cities (such as Zaragoza, Toronto, Lille, etc.). This project shows the distribution information of all registration points, the usage level of any time period, the current use process of each terminal and the availability of bicycles at each registration point.

Intensive activity of the subway network

The data generated by each user entering the huge network of the New York subway, what can we do with the data? How to use these seemingly irrelevant personal data (such as various tickets, stations, timetables and fares, etc.)? The amazing work published by the Wall Street Journal is a good example. Put this information on the map and add a logical relationship to the information to understand the changes in usage based on the tax price changes introduced in the price system.

Real-time bicycle usage

Another example of bicycles: showing the dynamic flow of bicycles over the past 18 hours.

What can you do with census data? With this building-level precision map, you can see the population distribution of ethnicity, income, family type, housing type and education level anywhere in the country, and understand the space of the country, region, city or street Distribution dynamics.

Time and distance

MySociety is a project developed many years ago. This project perfectly explains the role of geo-referenced data. The Mapumental tool shows the travel time from any place in the city to a certain place, which helps to understand the mobility of the time distance, which is more practical information than the physical "distance".

Day and night changes in the city

A simple and powerful idea: use the day and night population to reflect the density of different parts of New York.

Live Singapore

Another famous MIT project comes from the Seansable City Laboratory. The project uses different data sets to explain the impact of rainfall on the city's taxi usage, travel time prediction based on changes in traffic conditions, heat island effects, or the inflow and outflow of people and logistics in a city that is a global economic hub.

Understand air pollution

The invisible air we breathe becomes visible. This is the dynamic model of Maryland air pollution footprint proposed by Dalmark.