09
de Setembre
de
2016
Act.
09
de Setembre
de
2016
A city is its people, its history... And its data. The calls its citizens make, light consumption, the traffic... This multitude of data provides a portrait of a city and the life within it. And this information has great importance. With certain data, a council can better manage public transport or lighting, or a private company can find out about the most active neighbourhoods and take advantage of their consumption niches.
To gather, analyse and present all of the Big Data generated by the city is no easy task. The Catalan company 300.000 km/s, founded by the architects Mar Santamaría and Pablo Martínez, has been doing this for almost 10 years. "Our job is to explain the city," says Martínez, "the final product is displaying it, but behind this there is a lot of analysis."
300.000 km/s'projects combine the work of town planners, IT specialists and economists. "We realised that there was great potential for architecture and urban planning when we moved beyond our own field," says Martínez. "We, for example, gauge the economic functioning of a city. And that is not strictly speaking planning." Out of this multidisciplinary work have emerged projects like AtNight, the Carta Històrica de Barcelona or more recently, DataWar, which combines cartography and Big Data to tell the story of the war in Ukraine.
Explaining nighttime Barcelona
AtNight, the company's first large project, is a good example to better understand what 300.000 km/s does. It is in fact a study that gathers data from Barcelona during the day and night, and then compares them on an interactive map. The project analyses the photographs posted to Flickr, the tweets coming out of the city or on taxi trips. With this data, AtNight reveals more about the most-used streets or the tourist sites in the city by day and by night. And this data is very interesting for choosing where to place a new shop, in the case of a private company, or for deciding which areas of the city to develop, in the case of the local authorities.
A project like AtNight would have been unthinkable a few years ago. "We now have much more information. And that allows us to resolve problems that until now had no solution," says Santamaría. "Big Data (from sensors, mobile data, etc.) and also Open Data put us in a very interesting scenario," adds Martínez.
Explaining the history of the city
But what happens when this data is lacking? The Carta Històrica, one of 300.000 km/s' most successful projects, is a good example of this scenario. The website, set up with and for the Museu d'Història de Barcelona (MUHBA), for the first time on single interactive map shows the entire layout of the Catalan capital from 150 BCE until today. "That is also Big Data," laughs Pablo Martínez. A dozen people worked on the Carta Històrica, including historians, architects and programmers. These were the people charged with filling the gaps in the map, recovering digital and analogue maps lost in the city archive and displaying it all graphically. It is a titanic task that took them around a year and a half.
However, according to Santamaría and Martínez, it was worth it. The success of the Carta Històrica, they say, shows that history and heritage are of interest; and that it is worth making products of cultural consumption. According to Pablo Martínez, the study also proves that in Barcelona there is a lot more heritage than is highlighted. "We are doing a terrible job of showing our heritage," she says, "the centre is very built-up, and tourists do not get to many places that can be visited."
Explaining the war
300.000 km/s' latest project, presented at the Venice Biennale of architecture and advertising recently opened on the internet, has become a new challenge for the company. DataWar aims to describe a territory according to the data, as with the Carta Històrica or AtNight, but in this case with the peculiarity that the space portrayed is Ukraine, which is at war.
The data used in this case come from platforms like Redonbass, a website in which users indicate the level of destruction of streets and buildings, or Liveumap, a map of geolocalised photographs, messages and news with information about the war's different fronts. The project is a joint effort between 300.000 km/s and the Ukrainian cultural organisation Izolyatsia, a non-profit body founded in 2010 that, since 2014, has had its HQ in Donetsk, which is occupied by pro-Russian militias.
To gather, analyse and present all of the Big Data generated by the city is no easy task. The Catalan company 300.000 km/s, founded by the architects Mar Santamaría and Pablo Martínez, has been doing this for almost 10 years. "Our job is to explain the city," says Martínez, "the final product is displaying it, but behind this there is a lot of analysis."
300.000 km/s'projects combine the work of town planners, IT specialists and economists. "We realised that there was great potential for architecture and urban planning when we moved beyond our own field," says Martínez. "We, for example, gauge the economic functioning of a city. And that is not strictly speaking planning." Out of this multidisciplinary work have emerged projects like AtNight, the Carta Històrica de Barcelona or more recently, DataWar, which combines cartography and Big Data to tell the story of the war in Ukraine.
Explaining nighttime Barcelona
AtNight, the company's first large project, is a good example to better understand what 300.000 km/s does. It is in fact a study that gathers data from Barcelona during the day and night, and then compares them on an interactive map. The project analyses the photographs posted to Flickr, the tweets coming out of the city or on taxi trips. With this data, AtNight reveals more about the most-used streets or the tourist sites in the city by day and by night. And this data is very interesting for choosing where to place a new shop, in the case of a private company, or for deciding which areas of the city to develop, in the case of the local authorities.
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| The architects Mar Santamaría and Pablo Martínez. Ceded |
A project like AtNight would have been unthinkable a few years ago. "We now have much more information. And that allows us to resolve problems that until now had no solution," says Santamaría. "Big Data (from sensors, mobile data, etc.) and also Open Data put us in a very interesting scenario," adds Martínez.
Explaining the history of the city
But what happens when this data is lacking? The Carta Històrica, one of 300.000 km/s' most successful projects, is a good example of this scenario. The website, set up with and for the Museu d'Història de Barcelona (MUHBA), for the first time on single interactive map shows the entire layout of the Catalan capital from 150 BCE until today. "That is also Big Data," laughs Pablo Martínez. A dozen people worked on the Carta Històrica, including historians, architects and programmers. These were the people charged with filling the gaps in the map, recovering digital and analogue maps lost in the city archive and displaying it all graphically. It is a titanic task that took them around a year and a half.
However, according to Santamaría and Martínez, it was worth it. The success of the Carta Històrica, they say, shows that history and heritage are of interest; and that it is worth making products of cultural consumption. According to Pablo Martínez, the study also proves that in Barcelona there is a lot more heritage than is highlighted. "We are doing a terrible job of showing our heritage," she says, "the centre is very built-up, and tourists do not get to many places that can be visited."
Explaining the war
300.000 km/s' latest project, presented at the Venice Biennale of architecture and advertising recently opened on the internet, has become a new challenge for the company. DataWar aims to describe a territory according to the data, as with the Carta Històrica or AtNight, but in this case with the peculiarity that the space portrayed is Ukraine, which is at war.
 |
| AtNight provides information about Barcelona's most-used streets. Ceded |
The data used in this case come from platforms like Redonbass, a website in which users indicate the level of destruction of streets and buildings, or Liveumap, a map of geolocalised photographs, messages and news with information about the war's different fronts. The project is a joint effort between 300.000 km/s and the Ukrainian cultural organisation Izolyatsia, a non-profit body founded in 2010 that, since 2014, has had its HQ in Donetsk, which is occupied by pro-Russian militias.