Stamen Design

The City from the Valley

San Francisco

2012

Fundamental shifts are underway in the relationship between San Francisco and the Silicon Valley as legions of tech workers are opting to live in the city, thus reversing the traditional suburb-to-city commute. San Franciscobased communication design firm Stamen created The City from the Valley, a map of the alternate transportation network of private buses that threads through the city daily, picking up employees of Google, Facebook, Apple, and the like, at unmarked bus stops, and carrying them southward to their campuses. Deploying bike messengers and others to track the buses, Stamen collected route information and mapped what is a surprisingly vast, high-frequency, and unregulated system. Like previous projects such as Cabspotting and Crimespotting, The City from the Valley harnesses data to visualize the flows of urban activities, ultimately helping us to understand the changing patterns and needs of the city.

Accessibility, Community, Economy, Information
20,000
45 days
many
Problem - lack of information about private bus networks
Solution - track and graphically map bus lines