The intrinsic complexity of the emerging challenges human beings collectively face requires a deep comprehension of the underlying phenomena in order to plan effective strategies and sustainable solutions: from the planning of urban infrastructures to rethinking cities and their interactions, from containment strategies for pandemics to the impact of political campaigns to measures against information pollution and misinformation. In all these cases, decision-making processes have to be supported with meaningful representations of the present situations along with accurate simulation engines to generate and evaluate future scenarios. Instrumental to all this is the possibility to gather and analyze huge amounts of relevant data and visualize them in a meaningful way, also for an audience without technical or scientific expertise. Understanding the present through data is often not enough and the impact of specific decisions and solutions can be correctly assessed only when projected into the future. Hence the need of tools allowing for a realistic forecast of how a change in the current conditions will affect and modify the future scenario (what if games).
whatif-machine is a Sony CSL platform aimed at providing users with tools to assess the status of urban and inter-urban spaces and conceive new solutions and new scenarios. The whatif-machine platform is modular and new layers can be easily added depending on the needs. Below are the first three modules.
Timing Urban Spaces
CityChrone++ lets you explore in a very intuitive way the accessibility of urban areas by public transportations systems. The basic idea is to represent urban spaces in a way closer to people's perception where distances are replaced by traveling times. CityChrone++ provides you with a powerful tool to assess the present status of urban accessibility and design and evaluate future scenarios. Start out by choosing a city on the map. Read more.
The future of Electric Mobility
The transition towards private electric mobility has been already started across the world, pushed forward by the need of independence from fossil fuels and of preserving good levels of air quality in urban centers, where vehicular traffic is mostly responsible for air and noise pollution. Read more.
Build Your Ideal City
KreyonCity is an immersive experience that allows users to play with urban scenarios, exploring the space of possible solutions to issues like employment, education and quality of life the more general sense. The backbone of KreyonCity is a data-driven mathematical model of urban indicators that can be tuned with heterogeneous data sources coming from different nations and different time frames. Read more.
Timing Urban Spaces
CityChroneRT is an instance of the Citychrone++ platform that lets you explore the impact of public transport delays on urban accessibility. The basic idea is to represent urban spaces in terms of temporal distances and then see how these distances change under disruptions. With CityChroneRT, you can assess and compare the quality of public transportation in cities worldwide, visualizing real data on real movements of bus, metro, and tramways. Start by choosing a city on the map. Read more .
Timing Urban Spaces
Citychrone-15minutes is an instance of the Citychrone++ platform that lets you assess how far a city is from the 15 Minutes City idea launched by the scientist Carlos Moreno. According to this idea, a liveable and sustainable city should allow citizens to satisfy most of their social, economic and material needs with few displacements: ideally within 15 minutes on foot or by bike from their homes. With Citychrone-15minutes, it is possible to explore which parts of different European cities adhere to this concept, and which one is the most 15 minute city. Start by choosing a city on the map. Read more. Read more .
Timing Urban Spaces
Citychrone Safety Distancing Index is an instance of the Citychrone++ platform that lets you explore the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions on public transportation during the first Covid-19 outbreak. With the Safety Distancing Index(SDI), you can visualize overcrowding and criticalities on buses and metro-lines and assess the effectiveness of schools closures, remote-working and national lockdowns in reducing risky situations. Start by choosing a city on the map. Read more.