CityWays by Hyemi Song

CityWays is research at MIT Senseable City Lab to reveal human’s recreational patterns through visualizing datasets from self-tracking applications and environmental factors. In the CityWays web application, we explore the cities of San Francisco and Boston using billions of data points collected. Tens of millions of self-tracking applications are used by people eager to monitor how many calories they consume, how many hours they sleep, how many steps they take. By analyzing such data, we can start to understand the factors that influence outdoor human activity—such as weather, urban morphology, topography, traffic, the presence of green areas, etc. And, the piece also found implications on street design and zoning policies, possibly leading to a re-definition of well-known static metrics of walkability.