Design
Mapping the Hidden Patterns of Urban Life
Terrapattern collects visually similar features from satellite images into one searchable platform.
Think about the view from an airplane: the landscape organized into neat tiles of farmland, freeway roundabouts drawn into the earth like children’s scribbles, rooftop gardens dotted across the tops of urban skyscrapers. There’s a satisfying pattern to it all.
But that bird’s-eye view also offers an information-loaded perspective that’s now, accessible to the earth-bound. Terrapattern, an open-source prototype project that launched last month, employs satellite imagery to track visually similar occurrences in five cities: Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Detroit, New York, and Berlin. It will soon expand to several more, including Miami and Philadelphia.