Seeking Shadow

2024 · URBI Atlas, Dubai · Silver · Information is Beautiful Awards 2024

A cool fix for hot cities: how shade works as urban infrastructure, from trees and canopies to street geometry and simulation.

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The task

Made at URBI Atlas in Dubai, as part of my work there. The subject was shade in a hot city: how it works as urban infrastructure, and where a city can get more of it.

The result

A long-form data story on atlas.urbi.ae. Silver at the Information is Beautiful Awards 2024, in the Places, Spaces & Environment category.

Project sheet

My role: Concept, script, prototypes of every visualization, including the walk in the shadows, and development of the globe.
Made at: URBI Atlas, Dubai.
Award: Silver, Information is Beautiful Awards 2024, Places, Spaces & Environment.
When: 2024.

Process

Dubai rendered in one yellow from high above, every tower throwing a long shadow — The search for the opening shot. Dozens of iterations went into the style and the angle of the intro: one yellow for the whole city, every tower throwing its shadow, and a camera height at which all of Dubai fits in the frame.

A lower, closer render of Downtown Dubai in yellow, shadows crossing the roads — Another take from the same round, lower and closer to Downtown.

A 3D model of Dubai in yellow, every tower throwing a long shadow — The city model the story is built on. Every tower throws its own shadow, so the shade a street gets can be measured rather than guessed.

A strip chart of sunshine hours per day for cities of the world, month by month — One of the first sketches of the sunshine data. Each strip is a city, each row a month, and the length is the average hours of sun per day. Dubai and Riyadh are in orange: in August they are among the ten sunniest cities in the world.

Two hemispheres with the sunshine strips standing on their cities, Riyadh and Dubai circled — The same strips on an early globe, each one standing on its city, with Riyadh and Dubai circled.

A day in the shade, one of the story's walks. The scenario is built from real places, a real nursery, real shops, a real office and the real routes between them, so every step and every shadow profile rests on fact. Here Ahmed's commute: 1.1 km, 62% of it in shade. It was also the quiet way to demonstrate a new capability of URBI's map engine, which had just learned to cast shadows.

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