Sensing the City: Mapping London’s Population Flows

I recently had the pleasure of presenting at the first Data Visualisation London Meetup event where I spoke about some of work we do at UCL CASA. A fair chunk of the slides were movies so I thought it best to stick them in a blog post. If you like what you see you can sign up for the CASA masters course or check out our other blogs.

First up was my interactive surname map of London.  I used this to demonstrate that “Big Data” (the general theme of the meetup) is nothing new (we have collected large- scale population data for over a century) and that we can use visualisation to demonstrate complex data.

Next, was the now famous animation of London’s transport flows produced by Joan Serras.

I then went on to say that we can begin to build more sophisticated maps of public transport by utilising routing algorithms. We took this approach to map the 114 thousand or so bus trips in London each day.

I then showed a couple of top-secret visualisations produced by Jon Reades and others at CASA. Stay tuned for when these are released. Twitter data featured in all talks and my chosen animation was produced by Anders Johansson in collaboration with Steven Gray and Fabian Neuhaus.

Next up were a couple of visualisations of cycle hire data in London (animation by Martin Zaltz-Austwick),

and other cities (below) to see how people utilize the schemes. You can see Oliver O’Brien’s live map here.

The final slide demonstrates how we are bringing all these themes together with the “City Dashboard” project. Click here (or image below) to take a real-time look at your city.