Open Rio

Rio de Janeiro is an amazing city, but it is also a city of stark contrasts; it is not uncommon to find ultra-modern high rise apartments next to beautiful beaches overlooking informal settlements, or favelas. Although people living in these favelas readily integrate with the rest of the city, the same cannot be said of Rio’s middle and upper classes, who still shun the favelas because they are perceived as dangerous and unsafe.

Open Rio is a proposal for a physical digital intervention that visualizes and maps the interactions of visitors to favelas in real time. It provides a way to track the paths made by different people as they explore the favela, and overlays this information with data on events (e.g. parties, or happy hour at bars) and the GPS traces of community police forces as they patrol the favela, thereby providing a real time snapshot of where visitors in the favela go, what they do, and the relative safety of their environment.

This project was sponsored by the SENSEable City Lab Digital City Design Workshop. We are grateful to the State of Rio de Janeiro and the World Bank for their support.

---

A Anwar, Open Rio: SENSEable City Lab Digital City Design Workshop Spring 2012 (paper, video)