Richard Saul Wurman (creator of the TED Conferences), Radical Media and ESRI have combined forces to develop a web-based platform for urban data visualization: the Urban Observatory – “a live museum with a data pulse”.
By using a vast series of socio-economic, environmental, and geographic data, the Observatory hopes to act as a platform wherein cities can be compared and contrasted. At its launch, cities for which data has been made available include Abu Dhabi, Auckland, Chicago, Delhi, Hamburg, Johannesburg, London, Los Angeles, Milan, New York, Paris, Rio de Janiero, Rotterdam, Singapore, and Tokyo. The organizers are taking the view that new cities can be added via crowd-sourced data, such that any city could possibly be analyzed through the platform.
The Urban Observatory is launching today at the Esri International User Conference in San Diego, CA.