urasaru

Thump thump. There’s a lot of data out there. Right now, someone sent a geolocated tweet from over the road. Thump thump. And you’re sitting in a tax block that has three DOB violations, one outstanding road surface issue and an unresolved request for a bike rack. Thump thump. Someone upstairs in your building is photographing local stores and putting them on twitter, and just last week a volunteer group came by and uploaded details of your street trees to a webmap. Thump thump.

The Happening City map keeps an ear open for new data, all the time. As geographic information gets published, the Happening City absorbs it. Each update or new source is a mini heartbeat, and collectively the pulses of new information show what’s happening around you.

Zoom out, and the map really becomes informative. Each time new data is released, the map updates all five mile grid cells covered by that information. Compare places to get a sense of the scale of open data that we’re generating. If content generating, open places are liveable, find the hotspots on the map and move there. Keep zooming, and the grid resolution becomes coarser. You’re looking at the pulse of cities, regions, society, humanity.

Thousands of data layers go into the Happening City map, from federal datasets to local crowdsourced info. It’s a dynamic artwork, and an essential tool to measure the vibrancy of cities and regions. Wizzy algorithms plus some whizzier humans keep the inventory up to date and wise to the latest feeds and downloads. Everything gets republished as a data feed — we’re smart enough to avoid including that in the aggregation, could lead to a black hole.