Cities Visualized

Urban complexity is contributed largely by poor city planning and lack of data analysis
which amounts to the further problems. For a better understanding, data visualisation is an important tool. It works as an analyser, explorer and communication resource between the core conditions of the cities and the decision makers. This concept is useful for improvising the conditions as well as enhancing the transparency.
Visualising Cities headed for an open call submissions of the best visualisation created by designers, researchers and practitioners around the world. The Habitat III Visualizing Cities competition attracted over 100 submissions from around the world. The five entries selected as CityVis winners were just announced in Quito at the Habitat III

Five Winning Entries are:

1. Inclusive Maps

Area: Urban Development
Team: Ute Benz, Sylvia Kautz, Sebastian Rauer

In our system, maps are generally designed for all, which means it does not, caters any array. The team believes to have such inclusive map which inculcates specific needs. The project illustrates that every map is specific and no map is universally useful. For proving this approach appropriately the team has come up with some real examples and a reference system for designs. The reference system will be useful for cities with cultural diversity.

2. Chennai Flood Map

Area: Civic
Team: Arun Ganesh, Sajjad Anwar, Sanjay Bhangar, Prasanna Loganathar, Aruna
Sankaranarayanan

India: During the monsoon of 2015, Chennai suffered heavy rainfall and an estimated economic loss of $3 billion. Driven by the need for the information, a small group of open source activists launched a mobile friendly app to crowd source the location of affected roads. During the 2 week course of the rainfall, the tool had over 1 million views and collected over 15,000 reports of inundated street segments.

3. Conflict Urbanism: Colombia

Area: Migration
Team: Laura Kurgan, Juan Francisco Saldarriaga, Dare Brawley,
Anjali Singhvi
(Center for Spatial Research, Columbia University)

The inevitable migration of people to urban areas is a major resultant of socio-political battles at some places. This map represents the internal displacements of people during Colombian conflicts. It resulted into massive urbanisation from year 1985 to 2015. Each line’s thickness represents the density of displaced people, where white marks and orange marks represent origin and destinations respectively. Zooming in and out will highlight specific events and their consequences.

4. London Data Streams

Area: Culture
Team: Jacopo Hirschstein, Amanda Taylor (Tekja Data Visualisation)

Through exploration of sentiment analysis on twitter posts and Instagram, the map aims to provide a real-time experience of people’s notions in London city. The realisation of stories from huge data analysis provides an overview of city for the city decision makers. The London Situation room was exhibited at the Big Bang Data Exhibition.

5. Visualizing The Racial Divide

Area: Journalistic
Team: Jim Vallandingham (Bocoup)

With the help of 2010 Census, racial divide in 14 U.S. cities is represented in “Visualizing the Racial Divide” which gives viewer a provoking impact. Based on differing proportions of white and black populations, shapes representing the urban districts are gradually pushed away from each other in the map. This project only offers a limited view of urban inequalities, but is still a powerful reminder of the realities of the unevenness of city population distributions.