Two Strokes Along East London is a research study investigating ways to calculate and simulate unseen and unpredictable effects of public transport in a condensed urban context. Specifically focusing on overground passings in East London, the project benefits from a digital and academic background. Various computational data processing tools and digital visualisation techniques been used during the process.
By virtue of expanding the universe of information, we are able to understand cities and its sub-systems more and more vigorously each day. As Batty (2007) mentioned, cities are now seen as evolving beings, rather than design objects, with their behavioral processes. The metaphorical approach switch from thinking cities as rigid physical systems, to imagine them as organisms with organic sub-systems. Our comprehension derives with the amount of data we intersect. In this manner, we can interpret the circulation sub-system of a city as the flow of big data. Both the level of data depth and the variety of tools we can use to compute that data depth increases logarithmically. That is why the city itself was involved in the process as a plural figure since singular methods or singular figures are insufficient to grasp the most of the data produced.
Present conventional processes eventually turned cities into “smart” beings. (Linton, 2015) However, to be able to handle this logarithmic growth of data, cities need to be more than just being “smart”. Verebes (2015) stated in his article “Cities and Their Specificities” that, our abilities to visualize more complex and tangled information about cities gradually grows. Each day, we become more capable in terms of data processing. Linton’s (2015) aspect in terms of big data is that significant amounts of data can be analyzed in short terms which are almost impossible for a single human mind to process and create outcomes in any amount of time and with any mean of communication.