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.