Cities are not mere physical and organizational devices: they are informational landscapes where places are shaped more by the streams of contents and less by the traditional physical evidences.
Two layers coexist: a thick and dynamic layer of digital traces – the informational membrane – grows everyday on top of the material layer of the territory, the buildings and the infrastructures. The observation, the analysis and the representation of these two layers combined provides valuable insights on how the city is used and lived.
Urbanscope is a research laboratory where collection, organization, analysis, and visualization of cross domain geo-referenced data are experimented.
The Urbanscope research lab is based at Politecnico di Milano and encompasses researchers with competencies in Computing Engineering, Communication and Information Design, Management Engineering, and Mathematics.
The aim of Urbanscope is to systematically produce compelling views on urban systems to foster understanding and decision making. Views are like new lenses: they are designed to support the recognition of specific patterns thus enabling new perspectives.
The current research activity is focused on Milano and data coming from the use of social media within the urban context.