Urban Mosaic: Visual Exploration of Streetscapes Using Large-Scale Image Data
This tool addresses urban planning problems for professional practitioners by enabling visual comparisons and temporal analysis, though it is incremental as it builds on existing data-driven approaches.
The authors tackled the challenge of urban planning by developing Urban Mosaic, a tool that uses 7.7 million street-level images from New York City to explore urban fabric, demonstrating its application in analyzing accessibility, mobility, preservation, and retrofitting.
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.