The Patterned City
This is the website for Making Urban Ecologies Legible: A Conversational Interface for Environmental Time, a research project developed at Lancaster University’s international partner campus Beijing Jiaotong University, Weihai, in China. The project will prototype an environmental information system that captures fine-grained time-series environmental data in urban settings. Users can query through natural-language dialogue and creative audio/visualizations to explore events and patterns of urban environmental activity (e.g., birdsong, bat calls, traffic sounds) and physical processes (e.g., diurnal/seasonal cycles of light, darkness, temperature, air quality).
The system will make environmental data meaningfully legible to a broad audience—from citizens and non-specialists to urban designers, ecologists, and policy makers. It will enable citizens, researchers, and practitioners to attune to urban ecological processes and their temporal patterns. This expanded awareness will encourage environmental stewardship, facilitate nature-inclusive urban design, and support advocacy and green transition initiatives, while creating an exemplar of international standing for both research and impact.
Making Urban Ecologies Legible will deliver a proof-of-concept prototype and develop an international network between colleagues at LUCBJTU/BJTU, Sunway University, and Lancaster University. It will support a substantial grant application to extend to international partnersites after the pilot concludes.
Theproject responds to the New Urban Agenda regarding citizen-centric digital governance tools and open data systems to broaden participation and enable civic responsibility by prioritising transparent, accessible data about local environmental conditions (air quality, light pollution, biodiversity, temperature, humidity) in a planetary context.