“I've been fascinated by the idea of transforming cities' road networks into living corals for the last six months”. This is how Craig Taylor, a data visualisation designer at ITO World, describes a project he calls “Coral Cities”. Based on a complex web of urban arteries, Taylor explores mobility in some of the world´s major cities, creating coloured patterns representing the movement of people and vehicles.
The result of this aesthetic exercise – which features different forms – resembles coral, hence the name Taylor decided to give to his artistic project. The designer chose the cities with the best quality of life in the world – including Lisbon – to explore their infinite systems of roads, metro and train lines. The more complex the layout, the more prolific – or chaotic – the mobility.
“The variable patterns of urban forms are normally dictated by their road network: a complex and apparently organic connection of links that enables people to move around a city. Like branches of coral they have a pattern and a function, and I chose to expose this pattern and manipulate it to become something far more conceptual”, wrote the designer on his Medium webpage.
Or in other words, Craig wasn't satisfied with the static representation of the urban fabric. This approach also saw the artist create an animated video that provides a good idea of the mobility in each of the cities featured in the project. The form and movement of Lisbon, ranked 38th, is different to that of other capitals. The reason? Its riverside location.
This is not the case of cities like Rome, Paris, Vienna or even Stockholm, whose movement illustrated by the designer evokes the idea of centrality and suburbs: the web of branches is more concentrated in the middle and disperses the further it gets from the core. The 40-plus cities illustrated by the designer include Vienna, Zurich, Melbourne, Toronto, Boston, Dublin and San Francisco.
In movement
Craig Taylor´s project is not limited to an artistic concept. The designer works in the field and is fully familiar with the mobility industry and its most complex variables. ITO World, where he is employed as a "design manager", develops innovative solutions for reading traffic using powerful algorithms. The company monitors 4.3 million vehicles on a daily basis.
“What makes a major city? Is it political stability? Low crime rates? Access to education and health? We adopted a yardstick, analysing how easy it is for people to move around cities. We calculated how far you could travel (by car) from the city centre in 30 minutes”, explains Craig.
And this is where his 'coral formations' come into play: although they feature pretty organic shapes, they have an increasingly necessary practical function nowadays: they tell us what the best route is.