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Urban planning is increasingly data driven, yet the challenge of designing with data at a city scale and remaining sensitive to the impact at a human scale is as important today as it was for Jane Jacobs. We address this challenge with Urban Mosaic, a tool for exploring the urban fabric through a spatially and temporally dense data set of 7.7 million street-level images from New York City, captured over the period of a year. Work- ing in collaboration with professional practitioners, we use Urban Mosaic to investigate questions of accessibility and mobility, and preservation and retrofitting. In doing so, we demonstrate how tools such as this might provide a bridge between the city and the street, by supporting activities such as visual comparison of geographically distant neighborhoods, and temporal analysis of unfolding urban development. 

The recent explosion in the number and size of spatio-temporal data sets from urban environments and social sensors creates new opportunities for data-driven approaches to understand and improve cities. Visual analytics systems like Urbane aim to empower domain experts to explore multiple data sets, at different time and space resolutions. Since these systems rely on computationally-intensive spatial aggregation queries that slice and summarize the data over different regions, an important challenge is how to attain interactivity. While traditional pre-aggregation approaches support interactive exploration, they are unsuitable in this setting because they do not support ad-hoc query constraints or polygons of arbitrary shapes. To address this limitation, we have recently proposed Raster Join, an approach that converts a spatial aggregation query into a set of drawing operations on a canvas and leverages the rendering pipeline of the graphics hardware (GPU). By doing so, Raster Join evaluates queries on the fly at interactive speeds on commodity laptops and desktops. In this demonstration, we showcase the efficiency of Raster Join by integrating it with Urbane and enabling interactivity. Demo visitors will interact with Urbane to filter and visualize several urban data sets over multiple resolutions.