What is Urban Analytics

This chapter introduces a range of analytics being used to understand the smart city, which depends on data that can primarily be understood using new kinds of scientific visualisation. We focus on short term routine functions that take place in cities which are being rapidly automated through various kinds of sensors, embedded into the physical fabric of the city itself or being accessed from mobile devices. We first outline a concept of the smart city, arguing that there is a major distinction between the ways in which technologies are being used to look at the short and long terms structure of cities, and we then focus on the shorter term, first examining the immediate visualisation of data through dashboards, then examining data infrastructures such as map portals, and finally introducing new ways of visualising social media which enable us to elicit the power of the crowd in providing and supplying data. We conclude with a brief focus on how new urban analytics is emerging to make sense of these developments.