Creating, visualizing and modelling the real- time city Flora Roumpani Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis UCL London, UK flora.roumpani.11@ucl.ac.uk Oliver O’Brien Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis UCL London, UK Andrew Hudson-Smith Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis UCL London, UK Abstract. In this paper we describe the development of a number of projects which, through the use of new s- ystems and technologies, aim to change the way we perceive and study the urban environment. CityDashboard, Procedural Cities and PigeonSim are some of the projects presented that will attempt to provide an insight into the process of creating, modelling and communicating aspects of a “smart” city. In this framework, we are leading to the development of a comprehensive system which will aid in the analysis and understanding of the urban environment through urban visualizations, open data platforms, complexity theories and interactive systems. Keywords: dashboard; 3D; Google Earth; smart cities; open data; web-based I. INTRODUCTION Recent years have witnessed the emergence of new technologies that have changed the way we perceive urban space. Social networks, mobile communication technology, sensors, crowd-sourcing and several other systems have introduced new ways of social interaction and are subtly affecting the ways cities evolve. At the same time, they have provided us with useful tools for the better understanding of the environment we live in. A good example refers to the emerging science of “big data” which allowed researchers to study urban space, in both micro and macro levels, leading to an increasing interest in spatial analysis and related techniques [1]. These new developments, along with the increasing availability of open data, have become a powerful tool for distributing spatial information worldwide and allowed professionals of the built environment to re- evaluate current methods and explore new techniques which provide a better insight into how the city works and lead towards the creation of the “smart” city. II. CREATING AN OPEN CITY A. CityDashboard CityDashboard (http://www.citydashboard.org) was created by the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) in 2012. It was designed and created using iterative development principles, with a focus on near-live data. As such, it can be considered to be a proof of concept with development on-going.. CityDashboard consists of a service that collects various data from numerous external websites, normalises them, caches them, and makes them available in up to three versions. The first is formatted as a CSV, so it acts as a very simple API (Application Programming Interface) and allows CityDashboard data to be easily consumed by external services. Additionally, there are two versions in HTML format, for display on CityDashboard’s own website. All three are accessible via a URL crafted with the appropriate parameters for module, city and version. The accompanying website has three views of CityDashboard – a map, which uses the CSV version discussed above to display point-based data overlaid on it, a conventional “module-based” website, and a more conceptual and artistic “grid” view, these latter two views each use one of the HTML formats. CityDashboard has been configured for eight cities in the UK, as well as a number of bespoke environments for specific short-term purposes, such as for Amsterdam in the Netherlands for a conference presentation and for the UCL-owned museums in London. Each city has a configuration file which describes what modules are displayed for that city, city-specific configuration information (e.g. WOEID) for each of those modules, and how they are displayed in the project’s “standard” website. The guiding principle over the decision to include a data feed for a city in CityDashboard is that it must contain information that is generally publically available from the external source, via their website. In addition, the data should be frequently changing – as a guideline, generally only sources that have data updating at least once an hour are included. This is to ensure that the display of CityDashboard continuously evolves and changes, rather than appearing as a static display.