Probing Streets and the Built Environment with Ambient and Community Sensing

Data has become an important currency in today's world economy. Ephemeral and real-time data from Twitter, Facebook, Google, urban sensors, weather stations, and the Web contain hidden patterns of the city that are useful for informing architectural and urban design. However, often data required for informing a particular building or urban project is not available. In order to gather local and real-time data of the city, sensor devices, which are now embedded in today's urban infrastructures, buildings, vehicles, and mobile phones, have become useful tools for probing streets and the built environment. The proliferations of low-cost microcontrollers that leverage physical computing have also made sensor devices more accessible and easier to configure. The wealth of data from these sensors, if aggregated, synthesized, and analyzed, has the potential to increase our understanding of human and social behaviors in the city. This paper presents a number of projects which use ambient or community sensing to probe streets and the built environment in order to capture real-time and historical data that are pertinent to specific urban contexts. The data that was further analyzed could be used to better inform various stakeholders of the city in their decision-making processes, such as to assist travelers navigating the city by providing informed choices or to help architects or planners identify better design options in architectural or urban design, building retrofits, or new urban intervention projects.