Urban Pulse: Capturing the Rhythm of Cities

TL;DR

Urban Pulse introduces a novel framework to analyze and visualize city dynamics across multiple temporal scales using urban data topology, aiding experts in understanding city rhythms and patterns.

Contribution

This work defines the 'urban pulse' concept, leveraging data topology to capture city activity patterns across temporal resolutions, and provides a visual exploration tool for comparative analysis.

Findings

Identified prominent city pulses using data topology.

Developed a visualization framework for pulse exploration.

Validated utility through three domain-specific case studies.

Abstract

Cities are inherently dynamic. Interesting patterns of behavior typically manifest at several key areas of a city over multiple temporal resolutions. Studying these patterns can greatly help a variety of experts ranging from city planners and architects to human behavioral experts. Recent technological innovations have enabled the collection of enormous amounts of data that can help in these studies. However, techniques using these data sets typically focus on understanding the data in the context of the city, thus failing to capture the dynamic aspects of the city. The goal of this work is to instead understand the city in the context of multiple urban data sets. To do so, we define the concept of an "urban pulse" which captures the spatio-temporal activity in a city across multiple temporal resolutions. The prominent pulses in a city are obtained using the topology of the data sets, and are characterized as a set of beats. The beats are then used to analyze and compare different pulses. We also design a visual exploration framework that allows users to explore the pulses within and across multiple cities under different conditions. Finally, we present three case studies carried out by experts from two different domains that demonstrate the utility of our framework.