Real Time Rome

The real-time city is now real! The increasing deployment of sensors and hand-held electronics (such as mobile phones) allows a new approach to the study of cities and the built environment. In the visualizations of Real Time Rome we synthesize data from various real-time communications and transportation networks to understand patterns of daily life in Rome. We interpolate the aggregate mobility of people according to their mobile phone usage and visualize it synchronously with the flow of public transit, pedestrians, and vehicular traffic. This reveals for the first time the relationships between fixed and fluid urban elements: how people use neighbourhoods during the course of the day, how the distribution of buses and taxis correlates with densities of people and how different social groups, such as tourists and residents, inhabit the city in short, how the formal structure of the city relates with the informal, bottom-up patterns of daily life.