Sorting Out CitiesDietmar Offenhuber & Ars Electronica Futurelab (Roland Haring, Peter Holzkorn, Andreas Jalsovec , Michael Mayr, Nicolas Naveau, Emiko Ogawa) Miraikan Museum, Tokyo

Image: Miraikan – the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation, Tokyo.

Metro Manila Urban Extent 1975, 1990, 2010

German Remote Sensing Data Center, German Aerospace Center

1. Cities are small, the globe is large

2. Global AND highly granular datasets are rare

3. Global indicators are abstract constructs

Data - abundant or scarce?

Eric Schmidt: Every 2 Days We Create As Much Information As We Did Up To 2003

Data sources: Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE), University of Wisconsin-Madison, Center for International Earth Science Information Network – CIESIN – Columbia University, International Food Policy Research Institute – IFPRI, the World Bank, Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical, Deutscher Wetterdienst, the Water Footprint Network, Global Environment Monitoring Unit – Joint Research Center (JRC), Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital, United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division

Grey Water Footprint www.waterfootprint.org

Population Density, urban extent www.fao.org

Wage Density (Sweden). (Charlotta Mellander, Kevin

Stolarick, Zara Matheson, José Lobo)

NASA black marble dataset

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/NightLights/

“even after factoring out country and year fixed effects the simple correlation between the standard

deviation and mean of lights is 0.88.”

Henderson, J. Vernon, Adam Storeygard, and David N. Weil. 2009. Measuring Economic Growth from Outer Space. Working Paper 15199. National Bureau of Economic Research. http://www.nber.org/papers/w15199.

Explaining by sorting

Ursus Wehrli – Tidying up Art - http://www.kunstaufraeumen.ch/en

Cities occupy 3% of the earth’s land surface. If all urban areas would be combined in one large city, it would be slightly larger than the size of Europe, or about half the size of Brazil.

Data: MODIS 500-m map of global urban extent — Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE), University of Wisconsin-Madison

53% of the global population lives in cities; more than half of the global population lives in Southeast Asia.

Data: Center for International Earth Science Information Network - CIESIN - Columbia University. 2014. Gridded Population of the World, Version 4 (GPWv4)

In the western hemisphere, more water is used in production relative to the population density than in the eastern hemisphere.

GPCC Precipitation Normals Version 2010, Global Precipitation Climatology Centre (GPCC), Deutscher Wetterdienst

Hoekstra, A.Y. and Mekonnen, M.M. (2012) The water footprint of humanity, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(9): 3232–3237

Over 90% of the land mass is accessible in less than two days from a major city. In the densely populated areas, cities can be reached from most places in minutes rather than hours.

Travel time to major cities: A global map of Accessibility, A. Nelson, Global Environment Monitoring Unit – Joint Research Center (JRC), European Commission

Video by YouTube users: Shunichi Kitamura, barmaglot0

Sticky vs. Non-sticky data

Where is meaning located - in the data or the context?

In the context?

Drucker, Johanna. 2011. “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 5 (1).

Contact: Dietmar Offenhuber @dietoff d.offenhuber@neu.edu

MFA Information Design and Visualization Northeastern University http://northeastern.edu/visualization