Whereabouts London

Whereabouts London was an experiment in using open data to rethink how a city might be understood. Instead of relying on inherited borough boundaries, the project regrouped neighbourhoods based on patterns of how people actually live, revealing an alternative map of London shaped by behaviour rather than history.

As Head of Making at Future Cities Catapult, I built and led the Making Lab: a 12-person team of researchers, designers and developers. Following a major update to the Greater London Authority data store, I led the team in devising and building models that could show how open data might help people understand and improve urban liveability.

We generated a new data model of London using multiple sources, primarily the GLA data store, and used clustering to segment the city into comparable districts. The result gave people a different lens on London: one grounded in data rather than administrative history.