The Urban Toolkit

The Urban Toolkit is a growing ecosystem of open-source tools, frameworks, knowledge bases, and methods designed to simplify and accelerate urban data visualization and analysis. It enables researchers, experts, and developers to explore complex urban phenomena through high-level visual grammars, map-centric interactions, and curated datasets.

Links:

Main project site: urbantk.org
Code: github.com/urban-toolkit
Papers: urbantk.org/papers

OSCUR

The development of the Urban Toolkit is supported by the Open-Source Cyberinfrastructure for Urban Computing Research (OSCUR), the National Science Foundation project “Collaborative Research: Frameworks: Cyberinfrastructure to Catalyze and Sustain the Urban Computing Community” (NSF awards 2411221, 2411222 and 2411223). OSCUR is a $5 million collaboration between UIC, New York University and the University of Washington, with $1.75 million allocated to UIC. At UIC it is led by EVL faculty member Fabio Miranda (PI) and Sybil Derrible (co-PI) of Civil, Materials, and Environmental Engineering, and includes the departments of Computer Science and Civil, Materials, and Environmental Engineering and the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs. The grant runs from September 2024 to August 2029.

OSCUR addresses two obstacles in urban computing: the lack of documented, robust, well-engineered tools and open computing platforms, and a dispersed community of cross-disciplinary researchers and developers. At its core is a cyberinfrastructure of scalable, reusable and interoperable methods and tools for urban data, covering data discovery, cleaning, analytics, modeling, visualization, and reproducibility.

More on OSCUR: oscur.org, UIC Researchers Join National Project to Turn Urban Data into Healthier Cities, and OSCUR.