Data Visualized as City Lights at Night
Posted by: Doug, in Data Visualization, datasf, GIS, SpatialKey
Images courtesy of the Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center
As I was flying back home into San Francisco airport I was watching the city lights out the window and got struck by a bit of inspiration. I find cities beautiful, from the graffiti to the neon signs to the line of headlights on the highway. A city viewed from above at night is captivating. I wanted to try to recreate that same look, but by visualizing data (in one sense you can say that the real view of a city from above is already a visualization of population data).
I started searching for images of cities at night, and found these amazing images from NASA. All those images were taken from a space shuttle orbiting the earth. These images tell you a lot about the city, the layout, urban density, planning (or lack thereof). I wanted to take other meaningful data and create similar images.
All the visualizations below have been created with SpatialKey. However, this is some experimental work I’ve been playing with to generate the “night light” images, so it’s not released (and might not ever be). Basically this is a peak behind some of the R&D work I do for fun (yes, for a dataviz dork like me making fake “cities at night” images is my idea of fun).
Crime in San Francisco
This image is all crime in San Francisco for a 3-month period. You can see some of the same features that you can see in the NASA space image, such as Golgen Gate Park and the Presidio (the area on the north-west edge of the city). All in all it’s interesting how similar the crime image looks compared to the NASA image. Downtown is the brightest spot in both images, which means that it’s literally the brightest area of the city (the most streetlights), and also has the most crime.
And here are breakdowns for a few different crime types. Notice how different the distributions are. Narcotics crimes are heavily clustered and can be found downtown (in the Tenderloin), in the Mission (near the 16th St BART station), and along Haight Street near Golden Gate Park. Whereas vehicle theft is scattered fairly evenly throughout the city.
Graffiti Reports in San Francisco and New York
Both San Francisco and New York publish their 311 data, which is when citizens call for city services. One category of 311 calls is to report graffiti. Graffiti is interesting in that it often follows specific city streets. When we look at the graffiti data for both cities we see specific streets that have far more graffiti than others. I love these images (particularly the one of SF) because they really look like a view of street lights from a plane.
Trees planted in San Francisco
Another one of my favorites of this set is data for all the trees that the city of San Francisco has planted since 1990 (all this SF data is available at datasf.org). You can see the heavy planting along Market St (which cuts diagonally through downtown), as well as along streets like Sunset Blvd (the street running north/south on the western side of the city).
Street lights (or SF as a giant lite-brite)
One final image of San Francisco we have is the locations of every street light in the city. I liked this image because it reminded me of playing with a Lite-Brite when I was a kid. It almost makes city planning feel light a grown-up version of playing with little plastic lights.
Entries (RSS)
December 30th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Doug,
Cool. I agree with you, this is fun stuff.
December 30th, 2009 at 10:51 pm
[...] Data Visualized as City Lights at Night | Doug McCune [...]
December 30th, 2009 at 11:26 pm
[...] Data Visualized as City Lights at Night | Doug McCune [...]
June 5th, 2010 at 2:32 pm
[...] been playing with different ways of representing data (see my previous night lights example) and I decided to venture into 3D representations. I’ve used a full year of crime data for [...]
June 7th, 2010 at 9:10 pm
BTW, this is visualization of DATA about crime, not crime itself. Sorry to be so pedantic, but you may want to qualify your descriptions to make them a little more accurate. I think that some neighborhoods may not have a culture of reporting crime or may not have enough law enforcement agency presence to accurately measure crime.
June 8th, 2010 at 2:08 pm
[...] You can see that posting here: http://dougmccune.com/blog/2009/12/30/data-visualized-as-city-lights-at-night/ [...]
June 8th, 2010 at 9:38 pm
I’m with Kari, but I’d go further, it’s visualizations of data of REPORTS of crimes, and/or arrests, not CRIME DATA. As I just posted over on the new (beautiful) “elevation” visualizations, the difference is HUGE. Glad Kari went into explaining some of the MANY reasons they are not the same thing. Thanks again,
June 9th, 2010 at 1:10 pm
Can you do this for San Jose, CA? Thanks either way.
June 10th, 2010 at 7:24 am
[...] been playing with different ways of representing data (see my previous night lights example) and I decided to venture into 3D representations. I’ve used a full year of crime data for [...]
June 10th, 2010 at 4:16 pm
[...] been playing with different ways of representing data (see my previous night lights example) and I decided to venture into 3D representations. I’ve used a full year of crime data for San [...]
July 13th, 2010 at 12:20 pm
[...] Inspired by the view from a plane, data visualization engineer Doug McCune began thinking of visuali…. His images, mostly of San Francisco, present various crime and city planning datasets. For example, the image below shows all the tress planted by the city of San Francisco since 1990: [...]
September 18th, 2010 at 11:02 am
[...] Also we recommend that you have a look at his previous piece using this data, represented by the cities night lights http://dougmccune.com/blog/2009/12/30/data-visualized-as-city-lights-at-night/ [...]
October 6th, 2010 at 10:43 am
[...] is reported at least) in the city and where it occurs. It looks like he first visualized it as lights at night (this page has other examples, such as trees and traffic lights, too) and then got more detailed by [...]
March 26th, 2011 at 2:43 pm
I think I prefer the 3D elevation display, but this does look kinda cool too.
February 23rd, 2012 at 12:25 am
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February 25th, 2013 at 8:08 pm
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like this take a great deal of work? I’ve absolutely no understanding of coding however I was hoping to start my own blog in the near future. Anyways, should you have any ideas or techniques for new blog owners please share. I know this is off subject nevertheless I simply had to ask. Many thanks!