New paradigms for the Visualization of Urban Data.

While the awareness of the environmental, societal and economic challenges surrounding modern cities is growing, few inhabitants understand the principles and structures behind these problems. Engaging stakeholders in acting towards more qualitative and sustainable cities presupposes a complex way of communication, involving both discursive and pictorial information. The aim of this research is to investigate new visualization and interface paradigms that augment the civic literacy of everyday citizens while providing urban designers with richer datasets for modeling and analysis, through the mediation of information concerning, and situated within, the urban environment. By developing an information interface on the shared border of the natural habitats of the stakeholders - the 'physical' urban environment and its 'virtual' landscape of continuous data production - the interaction with information becomes recursive: action taken with it becomes itself new data that in turn informs everyone else. The resulting insights will provide the opportunity of integrating visualization as a medium in other socially relevant domains that require public and participatory knowledge sharing, such as education, environmental, awareness, preventive healthcare or social advocacy.

Keywords:Geography, Urban planning, Interaction design, Data visualization, Urban display, Human-computer interaction, Visualization, Urban computing

Disciplines:Applied mathematics in specific fields, Urban and regional design, development and planning, Communication sciences, Journalism and professional writing, Media studies, Other media and communications, Architectural engineering, Architecture, Interior architecture, Architectural design, Art studies and sciences