Pedro Miguel Cruz has published a series of video animations that reveal the traffic intensity in the city of Lisbon during a 24 hour period. It’s an example of information design applied to the field of urbanism providing a curious observation of the city as it comes to life, the streets pulsing as the arteries of a living organism as the traffic densities become more intense during the day. It would be interesting to further manipulate this data and associate these flows with different areas of the city considering factors like urban district period of origin or street typologies, exploring densities and occupation types within each sector. This would obviously involve the gathering of huge amounts of data and an army the size of Google to process, but it would also bring enormous potential as an auxiliary tool for urban planning.
I’ll keep paying attention to the work of this information designer and keep you posted as new things show up. Also, if you haven’t seen it before, make sure to watch his previous graphic experimentation titled Visualizing Empires Decline, which is really remarkable.
Via People and Place + The Pop-Up City.