Culture
Mapping the 'Time Boundaries' of a City
An EU-funded project is building platforms to detect patterns in how people use urban spaces.
Maps don't typically convey time very well. They're static snapshots of a moment in history. They tell you what exists, not when people go there, or how the value of a place might be tied to time – whether it's a nightlife district or a public park most popular with early-morning joggers.
We've come across a handful of animated maps that do a good job combining time and space, frequently using either transit data or geo-tagged social-media hits. Now a new project, called Geographies of Time, is trying to do something similar with a more typical two-dimensional map. The effort is part of a broader EU-funded project called UrbanSensing that's building platforms to detect patterns in how people use urban spaces.