What if an entire city could be visible from above, like we see it from an airplane?

Not simply buildings and squares, but also the aggregation of people who populate it, outdoor as well as indoor. We could detect public gatherings and traffic jams, estimate which neighborhoods are the most crowded, reconstruct commuting patterns during the day. All sorts of new services for the public good would be enabled, from emergency planning to traffic management, from the efficient allocation of utilities to impact assessment of new city infrastructures. 

We made the current city real, by leveraging those location data that our mobile phones generate over the course of the day. We made them anonymous, aggregated and processed through innovative algorithms. Without impinging on the privacy of individual subscribers to the network, our visualizations return important information on agglomeration and relative weights of human activities in the urban environment.