temporal-density-data

data and analysis tool for urban planners

What is this?

Population density is very important for urban planning and public policy. As far as I can tell, city/metro specific visualizations are only static. It would be helpful to visualize city specific data to see how a certain policy or political movement affects population denisty.

I wish to visualize this as "temporal 3d spike diagrams" so that they are more intuitive than binned/interpolated heatmaps. Seeing spikes grow and shrink over time would also be more intuitive than colors changing. City boundaries grow in area and neighborhoods can form within each other, so this presents a problem when visualizing. I have yet to find a solution (have not thought about it yet).

This could surely be extended to other metrics like income, demographic composition, test scores and spending. Inference on historical data (finding trends) would be interesting. It would be useful to integrate this with popular GIS tools.

Some analyses that I or you could perform:

Interesting questions I want to answer:

• How did the invention and/or the proliferation of the automobile affect historic urban densities?
• How did the oligopilization of the agricultural industry affect the density of rural areas?

Interesting topics to explore:

• Houston has a notoriously lax housing policy yet is one of the largest cities and also one of the most sparse.
• Racial migration within metropolitan areas