City Pulse: Revealing City Identity Through Abstraction of Metro Lines

Metro systems are the pulsing veins of cities, traversing the city's texture and preserving the memory of urban life. Visualizing invisible urban metro landscape makes each city's unique identity and development more emblematic. In this project, we introduce an abstraction method that encodes metro routes as lines, cities as squares, and the global map as an abstract representation. Along with the implementation of an interactive system, the project enables a comprehensive visual exploration of the global metro lines. Through this highly abstract and minimalist form, each city's structure, symbolic identity, and regional development are revealed. Moreover, the colorful global metro map efficiently portrays the diversity and evolution of metro lines worldwide. With this pictorial we narrate the design process and our reflections along the project.

Contributors

	Xinyue Chen Peking University Beijing, China A PhD candidate in InfoVis&VA. An admirer of data-driven, generative, interactive art. A data journalist, crafting stories with keystrokes. I delve into the flow of information, exploring generous human-AI interfaces. Wandering through the garden of forking paths, I write lines of data poetry.
	Yixuan Zhang Central Academy of Fine Arts Beijing, China Yixuan Zhang, a graduate student at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in China, majoring in Visual Communication and Interaction Design, is passionate about creating diverse forms of visual art and data visualization.
	Yutong Yang Shanghai Jiao Tong University Shanghai, China She is an idea proposer, currently a third-year master's student with interest in the intersection of data science, art and humanities. She loves visualization for its inclusiveness and creativity, and is willing to delve into the related research field. For more information: yutong-yang.github.io.
	Jing Chen Nanjing University of the Arts, NUA School of Design Nanjing, China Master student at Nanjing University of the Arts, research direction: information visualization design. His works have been shortlisted for the National Art Exhibition (2024), PacificVis 2024 Visual Data Storytelling, and selected for the China VISAP’24 Art Exhibition.
	Rebecca Ruige Xu College of Visual & Performing Arts, Syracuse University Syrcause, New York, United States Rebecca Ruige Xu, a professor of computer art at Syracuse University, focuses on artistic data visualization, experimental animation, visual music, and digital performance. Her work has been featured at venues like IEEE VIS, SIGGRAPH, Ars Electronica, and museums worldwide. rebeccaxu.com
	Dr. Wai Ping Chan Central Academy of Fine Arts Beijing, China Ph.D., Associate Professor, Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA). The Committee on Visualization and Visual Analytics of the China Society of Image & Graphics, Chairman of the ChinaVis 2024 Art Project. He previously served as the AD of the Olympic Art Research Center at the CAFA.
	Xiaoru Yuan Peking University Beijing, China Xiaoru Yuan, a professor at Peking University, leads the Visualization Lab, specializing in complex data visualization. An IEEE VIS award recipient, he is a key figure in IEEE VIS, ChinaVis, and serves on CCF committees for big data, HCI, and graphics.