Visualizing 590 Cities

We know that we are increasingly urbanizing but visualizing this phenomenon is difficult, that is why Bestiario‘s “590 Cities” presents such a sticking image of urban population changes. Visualizing.org describes this amazing stacked flow chart,

…that manages to pack all of those details into a single digital square. The visualization depicts the world’s 590 most populous cities, sorted column by column according to their population size between 1950 and 2010, with projections for 2015, 2020, 2025, and 2050. By rolling over the lines you can highlight individual cities’ growth trends.

Click on the images to see the full screen interactive visualizations of 590, read more about it on visualizing.org.

- Melissa

UNEP Map: Slum Population of Africa

Usually Asia and not Africa comes to mind when we hear about rapid urbanization.  UN-HABITAT however, warns that over the next 40 years Africa’s urban population will triple. With this trend in mind the results of Riccardo Pravettoni’s map below seem quite startling when one considers how many of Africa’s urban residents already live in slums.

Riccardo Pravettoni at UNEP/GRID-Arendal, a collaborating centre of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), uses pie charts to visualizes the share of urban populations living in slums –   areas defined as lacking infrastructure such as permanent housing, piped water and sewerage systems.

- Melissa

Source: UNDESA via maptd

Real Time City: LIVE Singapore

MIT’s SENSEable City Lab presents “LIVE Singapore!,” a series of five different perspectives of flowing real time data in Singapore.  The exhibit is composed of: multi-dimensional maps… showing the movement of crowds, taxis, airline passengers, the cityʼs fast changing microclimatic conditions, the islandʼs electricity consumption, as well as shipping containers passing through the worldʼs largest trans-shipment sea port in real-time.

The project was developed as part of the Future Urban Mobility research initiative at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART).  According to the projects leader the exhibit is:

…just the beginning of something that aims to develop into an open platform for the management of urban realtime data and the engagement of developer communities in writing innovative applications for the city.

Although this exhibit looks visually striking, the true test of the project’s success will be in how this information is actually shared with citizens.  In order to have a “real city” of flowing data, Singapore and MIT’s SENSEable City Lab should make the open platform for this data available not just for citizens to view in the internet but also to use and edit on other platforms.  Needless to say it will be interesting to see how this data-rich city works with MIT as this project unfolds.

LIVE Singapore! will be on display at Singapore Art Museum from April 8th until May 1st, 2011. Read more from FlowingData.

- Melissa

Container Ship Activity

Mobile Phone Useage

Photogenic Cities

Have you ever wondered how photogenic your city is?  Eric Fischer created a series of maps, ordered by the number of pictures taken in the central cluster of each city.  He use  geotagged photo information from public Flickr and Picasa folders to create these maps. Here are his top five cities:

1. New York City

2. London

3. Paris

4. San Francisco

5. Berlin

The complete set ranks 100 cities across the world.  Fischer does offer one disclaimer to his ranking system though:

This is a little unfair to aggressively polycentric cities like Tokyo and Los Angeles, which probably get lower placement than they really deserve because there are gaps where no one took any pictures.

Besides considering the general urban form of polycentric cities shaping where we take pictures, it is also very interesting to note that the top tweleve cities are all in North America and Europe, with Hong Kong appearing at #13.  Leading me to wonder how would these rankings look if data from popular photo sharing websites in Asia was also included in Fischer’s maps?

- Melissa

Ring Roads!

Ring roads are not loved by all planners, but the are certainly fascinating when compared across the world on this poster by Rice University’s School of Architecture: Rings Roads of the World.

Melissa