By Aaron Koblin. Created with Processing + Java and OpenGL

What if a whole city could be seen from above, as if we were looking out from an airplane? Not just buildings and squares, but also city’s occupants, outdoor and out. We would be able to detect public gatherings and traffic jams, estimate which neighbour- hoods are the most crowded, reconstruct commuter travelling patterns during the course of the day. There could be all sorts of new services for the benefit of the public, from emergency planning to traffic control, from the efficient allocation of utilities to assessing the impact of new city infrastructures.

Current City made this possible by leveraging those location data that our mo- bile phones generate throughout the day. This data was made anonymous, then aggre- gated and processed using innovative algorithms. Without impinging on the privacy of in- dividual network subscribers, Current City’s analyses provide important information on the concentration and relative weights of human activities within a given urban environment.

In cooperation with: University of Salzburg and KPN Mobile Data studies with MIT’s SENSEeable City Lab, Salzburg University Z_GIS and Current City. Data provided by KPN Mobile.