  Urban planning is increasingly data driven, yet the challenge of designing
with data at a city scale and remaining sensitive to the impact at a human
scale is as important today as it was for Jane Jacobs. We address this
challenge with Urban Mosaic,a tool for exploring the urban fabric through a
spatially and temporally dense data set of 7.7 million street-level images from
New York City, captured over the period of a year. Working in collaboration
with professional practitioners, we use Urban Mosaic to investigate questions
of accessibility and mobility, and preservation and retrofitting. In doing so,
we demonstrate how tools such as this might provide a bridge between the city
and the street, by supporting activities such as visual comparison of
geographically distant neighborhoods,and temporal analysis of unfolding urban
development.
