Cities Growing Like Corals,

the title sounded intriguing, so I had to have a look,

 scientist Craig Taylor looked at cities like London, Amsterdam and Rome amongst others and tried to visualize them in a series of creative road network looking like a snow flake, 

 the animations represent how far you can drive out of various city centers within thirty minutes, 

 Taylor chose the “top 40 places to live” as indicated by the Mercer Livability Index as his subjects with these arteries multiplying into wispy branches as they do in terms of geography, topography and architecture, notes data scientist Craig Taylor, and when they’re rendered in color and animated, they take on an unexpected abstract beauty, 

 “For the past six months I have been fascinated by the concept of making city networks look like living corals,” says Taylor, 

“The varying patterns of urban forms are inherently dictated by their road network; a complex, seemingly organic connection of links moving people across their city. Like branches of coral they have a pattern and a function, I chose to expose this pattern and manipulate it to become something far more conceptual. However, whilst being incredibly beautiful they are derived from various geo-spatial analysis of drive-times catchments making them somewhat informative as well.” 

the project comes to life in two animated videos, and it’s also available as a high-resolution poster, 

Taylor goes into detail about how the visualizations were created at Towards Data Science, and how with help from his wife the project blossomed.