![]() Businesses emitting pollution might not want to change their practices landlords might resist investing in making their buildings more efficient poorer communities might have less clout than wealthier ones. But using mapping is not just a matter of technocratic fixes: Revealing urban truths can also start political brawls. Monitoring pollution is a clear example of how sensor-driven, dynamic mapping can inform good government policy. With a small fleet, you could monitor a large portion of the city - and more cheaply than the investment of fixing monitoring stations on every block. Suppose you could attach mobile pollution monitors to the taxis. It is also a powerful finding for the practice of mapping itself. Such a mapping study has a direct policy application, by showing which urban areas may lack transportation access. Such a pattern also occurs in several other cities the lab’s researchers studied, from San Francisco to Vienna and Singapore, among others. Thirty cover half the streets, but due to convergent routes, it takes 1,000 taxis to reach 85 percent of Manhattan’s streets on a normal day. A mere 10 taxis visit one-third of the borough’s streets in a 24-hour period. Or consider a 2019 study Senseable City Lab study examing how many streets in Manhattan a certain number of taxis cover on a typical day. ![]() ![]() You don’t see everything, but you see things you were not able to see before.” “You can see things within cities that were not previously accessible. “It’s a little bit like the discovery of the X-ray,” Picon says. ![]() Such efforts, Picon observes, opened up research possibilities that many urbanists had not necessarily considered. A high-profile 2009 project, “ Trash Track,” based in New York City and Seattle, used sensors to trace the movement of garbage in those cities, and then across the country. A similar 2007 project, “ Wikicity Rome,” helped demonstrate the viability of studying the large-scale movement of people in an urban setting. One of the lab’s earliest projects to gain widespread attention, “ Real Time Rome,” tracked the flow of people in the city on the night of the World Cup final in 2006. “We hope to reveal here an urban landscape of not just spaces and objects, but also motion, connection, circulation, and experience,” the authors write. The new book provides ample imagery from Senseable City Lab’s past work, while delving into the ways such maps widen our understanding of urban functionality. Maps provide a way to visualize information. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology at Harvard. “These maps are a new way to apprehend the city,” says Picon, who is the G. The volume, “The Atlas of the Senseable City,” published today by Yale University Press, features both images of Senseable City Lab maps and analysis from Picon and Ratti about the evolving practice of cartography. Ratti and Antoine Picon, a professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, are co-authors of a visually rich new book examining the power and potential of dynamic mapping. The right maps can help individuals navigate the chaos of modern life, and empower activists to notice and highlight problems in their communities.” “New maps make the world more visible to all. “Used correctly, maps can be irreplaceable tools for democracy,” says Carlo Ratti, director of the Senseable City Lab. ![]() Often using mobile sensors or cellphone data, Senseable City’s mapping style - emerging from peer-reviewed research - broadens cartography in multiple ways: Data-driven maps, whether displayed in video form or as still images, expand the array of things that can be charted show changes over time and put new information in the hands of policymakers, residents, and others who want to govern communities well. This second kind of map is a specialty of MIT’s Senseable City Lab, an urban studies center that for two decades has popularized the use of pervasive data to explain city life. Alternately, there is a more dynamic way to map the city: use digital technologies to show the city in motion, charting pollution, traffic, pedestrian flow, crowds, commuting patterns, and other elements of our daily urban experience. Those are all static maps of long-term features, however. There are many ways to map New York City, including street maps of Manhattan’s famous grid, the brightly colored subway map, and souvenir maps of skyscrapers. ![]()
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