This article was taken from the June 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Here's a bird's-eye view of Geneva -- mapped through mobile-phone calls. The orange filaments depict the movements of people making phone calls in the Swiss city from 5pm to 6pm on Friday, December 2, 2011. "We named the project Ville Vivante, which means
'living city'," says designer Benjamin Wiederkehr, 31. Swisscom, the country's largest mobile network provider, provided location data on 14 million anonymised calls, then Wiederkehr's team mapped the movements of people initiating the calls.
The density of the orange lines indicates the level of activity. Wiederkehr now wants to use similar data to help city planners and local businesses understand urban movement. "Most of the time this data is unused, but it can tell a lot about a city and its people," he says.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
