Pulse of the City: Visualizing Urban Dynamics of Special Events

How does a city perform during a special event? How can we inform local authorities and urban dwellers of public happenings? Until today it has been difficult to monitor urban dynamics in real time. Traditional methods, like head counts, surveys, and aerial inspection, are costly and limited. In this paper we present our twofold approach to the processing and visualization of real time information gathered from the telecommunication infrastructures that percolate modern cities. This paper presents visualizations for a popular audience that examine the social psychogeography of the cityscape. Our work is a step towards understanding the functions of the city through digitally-enabled urban functions such as the pervasive telecommunications network. Based on an analysis of data from a telecom network, we illustrate how special events influence the normal rhythms of the city, and how crowds move and respond to large-scale public events. This paper also discusses the potential of realizing an interface aimed at informing urban dwellers in real time of the dynamics that occur in the very place they find themselves. We contend that this type of public intervention could enable local authorities, service providers, businesses, and citizens themselves to function and behave more efficiently, making the places they inhabit more livable and sustainable. This paper presents the two approaches, compares them to similar recent projects, and discusses the design choices that drove our implementation and the insights that we gained by their implementation.