Collecting and Visualizing Real-Time Urban Data through City Dashboards

Dashboards which collect and display real-time streamed data from a variety of rudimentary sensors positioned in the built environment provide an immediate portal for decision-makers to get some sense of their city and environment. These devices are linked to previous renditions of control and management of real time services in cities, particularly transport, in control-room like setting but they are more flexible and do not require massive investment in hardware. At one level they are essentially simply screens linked to some sort of computational device whose displays are focused in web-page like formats. Here we catalog the experience of building such dashboards for large cities in Great Britain. In particular, we link these to the emergence of open data, particularly reflecting the experience of the London Data Store, and we then show how such dashboards can be configured in many different ways: as data tables which give some sort of physical presence to such data delivery, to purposes built dashboards for schools, and to various moveable displays that have artistic as well as informative merit. To an extent as real time streamed data becomes less of a novelty, we expect these dashboards to merge into more generic portals but for the moment that represents one very public face of the smart city and its big data.