data

This is the second of three posts that explore the concept of urban information networks, that is, the flows of information in cities about what is going on. I am not thinking here of social networks, which deal with personal information, but rather of information concerning the how the city is working, both in the supply and the demand...[read more]

Uncovering the forces that push data centers to the periphery of society is not much of a puzzle. Companies stick a shovel in the ground out where land is flat and cheap—maybe even with the occasional local tax break. As a result, these large structures often swallow farmland or virgin wooded area instead of infilling around developed...[read more]

HopStop, a provider of pedestrian navigation and mobile transit routing services, released the Urban Travel Patterns infographic last week. The infographic gives insights into how commuters in more than 68 major metropolitan areas across 150+ cities travel. “Based on more than 400 million completed routes and 2.25 billion...[read more]

When Chris and Carolyn Clemans moved 2 1/2 years ago from a suburb of Syracuse, New York, to the city’s gritty Near West Side, they were among the first urban pioneers to join an effort to revitalize one of the city’s most impoverished neighborhoods. Today, a dozen formerly rundown homes in the vicinity have been fixed up by new owners...[read more]

For the 24,000 people who attended the US Green Building Council’s Greenbuild 2011 conference and expo in Toronto last week, there was a simple question: what's NEXT for green building?[read more]

One of the advantages of social media and web 2.0 technologies are their relatively low cost of use. Part of the reason for this derives from the use of “cloud computing” – which shifts data and software from desktop PCs and servers to the Internet (the cloud is just a metaphor for the Internet and its networked typology). This allows for many individuals and organizations to utilize computing infrastructure that they might not otherwise be able to afford or maintain on their own to access and deliver files and applications to anyone with access to the Internet.[read more]

How has the Great Recession impacted consumer demand for green buildings? I believe this is a question we will grapple with for years to come. A recent report titled "Dollars and Sense" published by CBRE seems to suggest that support for green buildings is waning. The report should soon be available on the CBRE website and the company provided a preview during Greenbuild.[read more]

Over the past few months we have been harvesting geospatial data from Twitter with the aim of creating a series of new city maps based on Twitter data. Via a radius of 30km around New York, London, Paris, Munich we have collated the number of Tweets and created our New City Landscape Maps. New York New City LandscapeImage by urbanTick...[read more]

The ubiquitous nature of digital data offers unique opportunities to display data about places that tells us a much richer story about ourselves than the actual city. Case in point, spotted via A Daily Dose of Architecture - are these 'Geotaggers' World Atlas' maps generated from geographically tagged data of uploaded photos to popular...[read more]