cf. city flows
A three-screen installation in which thousands of animated bike-sharing trips condense into comparative portraits of New York, Berlin, and London.
cf. city flows is a comparative visualization environment of urban bike mobility: three high-resolution screens, side by side in a public exhibition space, each showing the bike-sharing system of one city — New York, Berlin, London — as thousands of animated journeys flowing through the night.
Every trip leaves a trail of light; together the trails condense into a portrait of a city defined by its transient dynamics rather than its buildings. Because the three cities run in parallel under the same visual language, visitors start comparing casually — and read the pulse of urban mobility without ever seeing a chart.
The piece moves between two modes — evocative, flowing views for ambience and staged, comparative views for analysis — a strategy we wrote up as “Staged Analysis” for IEEE VISAP. It traveled from Streams and Traces in Berlin to the IEEE VIS Arts Program in Baltimore and The Art of Networks in Boston, and was covered by The Guardian, VOX, and the Processing.org exhibition.
In a separate study I pushed the approach further and designed a set of tools for the space-time geography of flow data — early experiments visualizing origin/destination movement with edge bundling in 3D (screenshots).
Developed with Till Nagel and Marian Dörk at the Urban Complexity Lab, FH Potsdam.
