New York City is famously divided into five boroughs, each with its own quirks and cultural nuances. So much of how the city is understood comes from the political boundaries of Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island, the boundaries of which were drawn up in the 1800s. Topos, an urbanism-oriented artificial intelligence startup, thinks it’s a woefully obsolete and outdated way to think about the city.
Meanwhile, about half of New York City’s residents live in “North and South Bend,” predominately residential neighborhoods with less commercial variation than the Ring or Minihattan. These are denoted in blue and red on the map and include Washington Heights, the Bronx, southern Brooklyn, northeastern Staten Island, and central Queens. The fifth borough, as Topos sees it, is called “the Meadows” (denoted in yellow) and is characterized by leafy, low-density suburban homes. This includes neighborhoods along the far eastern shores of the Bronx, Staten Island, eastern Queens, and the Rockaways.
“AI is essential for smart urban planning because it can give us a
real-time understanding of what cities feel like moment to moment
rather than decade to decade,” Topos cofounder Will Shapiro tells Co.Design via email. “Unlike manual tools such as the U.S. Census, our platform enables a dynamic, highly granular, and globally scalable view of cities and neighborhoods. By pulling from a wide variety of technologies and disciplines–computer vision, natural language processing, network science, machine learning, statistics, topology, urbanism, data visualization, and information design–we are going beyond more familiar demographic viewpoints to capture the personality of a place, and what it feels like to actually be there.”
See the maps in the slide show above and read more about the process on Medium.