It’s one thing to say that climate change is taking its toll on cities, or that 2.5 billion people will pack into urban areas by 2050. It’s another to actually show how the impacts of global warming change over time and how migration patterns look.
That’s where science, data, and visualizations come in, argues Marian Dörk, an information visualization researcher at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam in Germany. He and his colleagues behind the project Visualizing Cities are at the Habitat III conference this week to showcase how interactive maps contribute to the quest for urban sustainability.