Urban Mosaic: Visual Exploration of Streetscapes Using Large-Scale Image Data

TL;DR

Urban Mosaic is a visualization tool that leverages large-scale street-level image data to aid urban planning by enabling detailed spatial and temporal exploration of city streetscapes, fostering insights into accessibility, mobility, and urban change.

Contribution

This paper introduces Urban Mosaic, a novel tool that integrates extensive street-level imagery data for comprehensive urban analysis at a city scale.

Findings

Facilitates visual comparison of distant neighborhoods.

Enables temporal analysis of urban development.

Supports urban planning activities with rich visual data.

Abstract

Urban planning is increasingly data driven, yet the challenge of designing with data at a city scale and remaining sensitive to the impact at a human scale is as important today as it was for Jane Jacobs. We address this challenge with Urban Mosaic,a tool for exploring the urban fabric through a spatially and temporally dense data set of 7.7 million street-level images from New York City, captured over the period of a year. Working in collaboration with professional practitioners, we use Urban Mosaic to investigate questions of accessibility and mobility, and preservation and retrofitting. In doing so, we demonstrate how tools such as this might provide a bridge between the city and the street, by supporting activities such as visual comparison of geographically distant neighborhoods,and temporal analysis of unfolding urban development.