MORPHOCODE

Data on a
human scale
A playbook on using location data and modern
web technologies to explore the city
Discover the
unexpected
When John W. Tukey wrote Exploratory Data Analysis in 1977, he embraced "the
discovery of the unexpected" and stated that finding structures in data requires two
things: tools and understanding. While we've come a long way since Tukey's seminal
work and the availability of open data has increased substantially, making sense of
that data remains time-consuming and requires domain knowledge.

With Morphocode Explorer, you can spend less time collecting, cleaning, and
refining data and focus on your research. The powerful, easy to use interface allows
you to explore location insights faster than ever.

In this report, you will learn more about the making of Morphocode Explorer and
the research behind the tool.

MORPHOCODE 02
Data on a human scale
Contents

The 5-minute walk 05-11

Measure what matters 12-18

Morphocode Explorer 19-27

Appendix 28-31

03
 Morphocode Explorer is an urban
analysis tool that allows you to assess
existing site conditions, measure key
urban indicators, and perform spatial
research — directly in the browser.

Radius Slider Interactive Map

Draggable Pedshed

Layer Navigation

Key Metrics

http://explorer.morphocode.com 04
PART 1

The
5-minute
Walk
 In urban analysis, the five-minute
walk sets a scope for collecting both
quantitative and qualitative data on a
human scale.

The 5-minute walk, also known as the “pedestrian to depict areas of equal travel time, while circular
shed” is considered to be the distance people are buffers represent distance “as the crow flies.” They do
willing to walk before opting to drive. Based on the not take into account the street grid or physical
average walking speed, a five-minute walk is barriers that may affect how people move. However,
represented by a radius measuring ¼ of a mile or using a circular buffer is a common way to identify
about 400 meters. This rule of thumb is used to areas that are accessible from a given location and to
calculate public transport catchment areas or to perform site analysis.
determine access to destinations within
The pedestrian shed is usually placed around a
neighborhoods.
community center or a common destination, such as a
Pedestrian accessibility can be visualized with school or a public plaza, where social and commercial
isochrones or by using a simple buffer. Isochrone activity is focused.
maps are often used in transportation planning

5 MINUTES

BUFFER
Buffers represent the
walking distance “as
the crow flies”

0.25 mi
ISOCHRONE
Isochrones take into
account the irregularity
of the street grid

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“In a sense every great
city is a conglomeration
of small communities.”
- Clarence Perry

The 5-minute walk can be traced back to a concept

known as the “neighborhood unit.” The neighborhood
unit is a community model conceived in the 1920s by
Clarence Perry. It gained popularity after being
published in the 1929 Regional Survey of New York City.

Perry’s diagram provided a planning tool for a self-

contained residential community. The study was largely
influenced by the growing automobile industry in the
United States and identified the car as “a new factor in
the making of residential neighborhoods.” The goal of
Perry’s research was to investigate the scale, spatial
arrangement, and land use of residential communities
and, ultimately, to provide a new planning framework.

Perry’s original neighborhood unit diagram (1929) Perry placed the elementary school in the center of the
neighborhood and used it to determine the size and
structure of the residential community: the school had to
be within reach for all residents. This condition set the
quarter of a mile walking distance at the core of the unit
scheme. Together with local retail shops, public spaces,
and residential buildings, the elementary school
represented one of the four main functions in the
neighborhood unit, as conceived by Clarence Perry.

Through the years, the neighborhood unit concept has

received both high praise and severe critique. While
Andres Duany has described Perry’s scheme as “the
most famous diagram in the history of American
planning,” other scholars have argued that the concept
encouraged the development of gated communities.
Nevertheless, Perry’s diagram has contributed to the idea
of the pedestrian shed as a universal tool for measuring
key urban indicators and planning compact, liveable
neighborhoods.

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 5 min vs 10 min
How long is too long?
Most researchers agree that the quarter of a mile A large part of the research on walking behavior
(400m) walkable catchment is a reasonable distance focuses on commuting and access to transit. Results
for determining access to public services, and as a suggest that most people are willing to walk longer
result, for measuring how walkable a community is. to access rail than to access bus. That is why half-
mile buffers are typically used to define catchment
In reality, the street grid, sidewalk design,
areas around rail stations, while quarter-mile buffers
environmental factors, and safety considerations
are applied around bus stops.
affect how long people are willing to walk to reach a
destination.

10 MINUTES

5 MINUTES

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Walkable
The pedestrian shed is used to determine the location of
schools, measure accessibility to public open space, or
even define the sidewalk width.

distances In site analysis, the pedestrian shed sets a scope for

collecting spatial data and helps generate evaluation

in policy metrics around major community destinations. It also

incorporates the human scale in urban policy and
provides a pedestrian-oriented approach to city planning.

For example, one of the central goals of OneNYC – New

York City’s strategic development plan – is to increase the
percent of New Yorkers who live within a 10-minute walk
to public open space. The NYC Plaza Program, which
celebrated its 10th Anniversary in 2019, is part of that
effort. Since its inauguration, the program successfully
combined the principles of tactical urbanism with a data-
driven approach to planning and design.

Bus stops r = 1/4mi

A bus can stop every 1/8 mile

1/2mi

Tram stops r = 1/4mi

A tram can stop every 1/2 mile

1 mile

Light rail
r = 1/2mi
Light rail can stop every mile

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 Meanwhile, cities like Portland, Detroit, Atlanta, and
Melbourne have embraced the “20 Minute
Neighborhood” concept.

According to Melbourne’s planning strategy, 20-minute

neighborhoods aim to encourage local living by creating
accessible, safe, and attractive local areas where people
can reach most of their everyday needs within a 20-
minute walk, cycle, or local public transport trip.

Walking distance metrics have also made their way into

the world of LEED, namely The LEED for Neighborhood
Development. This certification incorporates various
indicators based on walking distances with an intent to
reduce vehicle usage and encourage walking, biking, and
transit use. The rating system relies on both quarter and
half-a-mile buffers to measure components such as
connectivity, neighborhood assets, and land use mix.

Liveable
neighborhood
hierarchy
diagram

District center
Local centers
Open space
Primary school
Secondary school
Pedshed - 0.25mi
Pedshed - 0.5mi
Street grid

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The pedestrian shed is a universal
tool for urban analysis. It is used to
evaluate key urban metrics around
major community destinations.

Walking is a form of active transportation: we walk to

reach destinations, for leisure, or to access transit
services en route to more distant destinations. The 5-10
min walk is the most common scale for walking
activities in an urban environment. Especially when it
comes to reaching transit or running daily and weekly
errands. We tend to choose the shortest, safest, and
most pleasant routes for these recurring journeys.

Whether we choose to walk and for how long depends

on many location-specific factors like safety, street
design, and scale of the urban environment. It is also a
matter of personal choice. The pedestrian shed of 5 -
10 minutes walking distance is deeply embedded in
transit service planning. It is also the building block of
liveable neighborhoods and an essential tool for
measuring walkability.

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PART 2

Measure
what matters
 Urban performance measures

Peter Drucker laid the foundations of modern management, insisting that you
can’t improve what you can’t measure.

In urban planning, this line of thought has transformed the way we set goals,
track progress, and analyze the effects of implemented projects and policies.
Urban performance measures help communities make informed decisions
and measure results against goals.

Land use mix Street Network

Built Density Points of Interest

Transit Network Housing Density

Cycling / Micro Mobility Figure Ground

Demographics Safety

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Land Use Mix
Land use data reveals the general distribution of existing Key urban indicators
functions and the proximity to destinations or community-
serving facilities within the area. Compact, well-connected • Ranking of land use by area

neighborhoods provide a good mixture of uses by including • Entropy score

housing, retail, office, and community facilities within walkable • Access to open space

distances of each other. • Vacant land

Land use mix affects travel mode choice and is an essential

component of walkability. Mapping land-use helps you to
determine access to public spaces and institutions like parks
and schools or to identify vacant land for future development.

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Built Density
Floor area ratio (FAR) is a standard urban indicator that Key urban indicators
measures urban density. It is calculated by dividing the total
floor area of the constructions on the lot by the lot area: • Overbuilt land area
• Underbuilt land area
FAR = FLOOR AREA / LOT AREA • Median built density
• Distribution of lots by density

Higher FAR typically corresponds to dense areas in the city

center, while lower FAR is associated with less dense areas.

Zoning regulations usually set a maximum allowed FAR for

each lot.

Built density a.k.a. Intensity of development is closely related to

FAR. It is calculated as a percentage by dividing the FAR of the
lot by the maximum allowed FAR:

DENSITY = BUILT FAR / MAX ALLOWED FAR * 100

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Transit Network
Distance is the primary factor affecting travel mode choice. Key urban indicators
Access to transit within walking distances of places where
people live and work is crucial for maintaining the economic • Access to subway stations

vitality and quality of life in cities. • Access to bus stops

• Access to rail stations
Research on walking behavior suggests that most people are • Transit line diversity
willing to walk about ten minutes to reach a rapid transit station
and about five minutes to a local bus stop. That is why a
quarter-mile buffer is used to determine catchment areas
around bus stops, while a half-mile buffer is usually applied
around rail stations.

Higher stop density encourages residents to walk to transit. It

provides better accessibility and shorter trips to nearby
stations.

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Demographics
Multiple factors determine a neighborhood's context. Key urban indicators
Among them, the demographic and socioeconomic
characteristics are essential metrics for understanding existing • Total population

conditions. • Population density

• Racial / ethnicity groups
Census data provides valuable insights into the demographic • Age / Sex distribution
character of neighborhoods and is the primary source of • Percent Female
information on topics like racial diversity, age, and sex • Racial Diversity Index
distribution for every community. It allows us to isolate trends,
observe how the population declines over time, or to recognize
social displacement processes.

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Figure Ground
A figure-ground diagram is a mapping technique used to Key urban indicators
illustrate the relationship between built and unbuilt space in
cities. Land coverage of buildings is visualized as solid mass • Number of buldings

(figure), while public spaces formed by streets, parks, and plazas • Footprints area

are represented as voids (ground). • Solid / Void ratio

In urban planning, this simple yet powerful graphic tool is used

to explore built form patterns and the continuity of open space.

The figure-ground diagram is an important element of urban

analysis. It is a great way to study the grain of development and
the overall morphology of the city.

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PART 3

Morphocode
Explorer
 Designed for discoveries
As Dieter Rams famously said, “Good design is as The interface combines a map and a sidebar
little design as possible.” So it is essential to identify containing various urban indicators. The metrics are
the primary user interactions early on and put them organized into separate layers: land use, built density,
at the core of the tool. transit network, demographics, and figure-ground.

In Morphocode Explorer, you can drag the circular You can scroll through the sidebar to switch
pedshed to select a location on the map, while the between the layers and explore the various charts
sticky slider lets you quickly adjust the radius of the and data visualizations.
study area.

Radius Slider Interactive Map

Draggable Pedshed

Layer Navigation

Key Metrics

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 From idea to implementation

Building an interactive tool for data exploration

UX Design
consists of three main tasks: designing the user
experience, transforming the various raw datasets
into a compressed data format, and developing the
“live” functionality using modern web technologies Data Pipeline
and APIs.

Since the early UX sketches, the design goal was to

Web Development
keep the interface minimal while still providing a
data-rich experience.

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 Data visualization

Presenting large amounts of data in a single view It is essential to use a consistent visual language and
is a challenging task. There is a risk of bloating the choose visualization techniques based on the nature
interface with too many options and ultimately of your data.
overwhelming the user with various checkboxes,
We experimented with different data visualization
toggles, and drop-downs.
typologies and ended up developing various
Good design introduces a clear visual hierarchy that components, including proportional area charts,
guides the eye and brings attention to the most histograms, donut charts, bar charts, and dot
important elements of the interface. matrixes.

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 Data Layers

At the core of Morphocode Explorer are various the New Jersey railroads are published as a
datasets: census data, tax lot information, transit shapefile, the Staten Island railroad is extracted from
routes, building footprints, etc. These datasets are the LION dataset, while the Amtrak routes are
acquired from multiple sources and come in a variety retrieved from OpenStreetMap.
of file formats.
We use python to clean, transform, merge, and refine
For example, the Transit Network layer is composed the datasets. This approach helps document and
of over 15 different datasets — the subway lines are automate data processing.
extracted from a static GTFS feed provided by MTA,

275000

250000

225000

200000

175000

150000

125000

925000 950000 975000 1000000 1025000 1050000 1075000

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 Building a custom data pipeline

01 It all starts with acquiring the raw datasets: these could

be geospatial datasets of building footprints and tax
lots, GTFS feeds specifying transit schedules or third-
Raw data
party datasets in a proprietary format.

02 Data can be messy: it comes from various sources, and

often doesn’t have structure, or contains errors and Transforming
missing fields. You need to clean, filter, and refine the data
datasets before making use of them.

03 You can enrich the original dataset by merging multiple

data sources. This process lets you combine geographic
Data
and attribute data to gather more information about the
enrichment
study area.

04 By calculating key urban indicators, you can answer

questions such as how to improve access to transit, is Calculating
there a good mix of land uses, or how diverse is a key indicators
neighborhood.

05 To perform analysis in the browser, you need to export

the geospatial data into a set of map tiles. These tiles Exporting for
contain vector data that can be indexed and queried the web
efficiently by Morphocode Explorer.

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 The Challenge

Traditionally, location analysis is done on the PostgreSQL under the hood, while the ArcGIS API
desktop using GIS and statistical applications such lets you query an ArcGIS server.
as ArcGIS, QGIS, and RStudio. These applications
This client-server architecture lets you scale your
are more powerful than the browser when it comes
analysis to billions of data points. The downside is
to crunching large amounts of data and performing
that your browser has to keep making requests to
spatial analysis.
the server. This causes a noticeable delay between
Analyzing large datasets in the browser is possible, dragging the pedshed and updating the metrics.
but there’s a “catch” — the heavy computations must
To achieve real-time interaction, the data analysis
be offloaded to a remote database that is powerful
must happen in the browser. This approach removes
enough to make the analysis. For example, the web
the delay associated with client-server
platforms OmniSci and Kinetica run on top of
communication.
powerful GPU-based engines, Carto uses

Requesting Data

Updating Metrics

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Real-time interaction
The algorithm

MORPHOCODE

Find all features within the study area

This is a geospatial operation known as a spatial query. To

speed up the query, Morphocode Explorer checks whether
the geometric center of each feature is within the circular
buffer.

MORPHOCODE

Draw only the selected features

Morphocode Explorer uses the open-source library mapbox-

gl-js to render the map. The library is extremely fast because it
draws the features using WebGL. Nevertheless, we ended up
customizing how mapbox-gl-js works under the hood to
speed up the rendering algorithm.

MORPHOCODE

Calculate the metrics and update the charts

The metrics are calculated on the fly as you drag the

pedshed. The charts in the sidebar are optimized for fast
updates using d3.js

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 Application architecture

The front-end of Morphocode Explorer is written Keeping track of these dependencies can quickly
using modern JavaScript. It takes advantage of ES6 get out of control and lead to bugs. To solve this,
modules, arrow functions, destructuring, async/ Morphocode Explorer uses a Flux-style application
await, and other newer features of the language. The architecture popularized by Facebook. The source
source code is bundled and compiled to ES5 using code is organized into data stores, view
rollup and bublé. components, and a central action dispatcher.

Due to the interactive nature of the application, there Data flows in one direction — from the data stores to
are a lot of moving parts. For example, dragging the the view components. Changes in the application
pedshed redraws the map, but it also triggers an state occur in response to events dispatched
update of the metrics; scrolling through the sidebar through the action dispatcher.
updates the map layers, but it also fires network
requests to fetch new data.

Events

Data Stores

Layer Store Pedshed Store

Transit Network Store Land Use Store

View Components

MapView Sidebar

Histogram Map Layer

Button Brushable Layer

Land Use Panel Pedshed Buffer

Application
State

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Discover more
Starting a project? Morphocode Explorer can be customized to meet

specific requirements. Get in touch if you want to learn more about the tool

and how you can integrate it into your existing workflow.

We’d love to talk to you

about what Morphocode
Explorer does and how we
might help.
www.morphocode.com/contact
www.morphocode.com/contact
www.morphocode.com/contact

MORPHOCODE 28
 References
Been, V., Madar, J., and McDonnell, S. (2009) NACTO (2016), Global Street Design Guide, National
Underused Lots in New York City. Lincoln Institute of Association of City Transportation Officials, Global
Land Policy Working Paper. Designing Cities Initiative. Washington: Island Press.

Campoli, J., & MacLean, A. S. (2007). Visualizing Morphocode. The figure-ground diagram. https://
density. Cambridge, Mass: Lincoln Institute of Land morphocode.com/figure-ground-diagram/
Policy.
Morphocode. The 5-minute walk. https://
Desimini, J.; Waldheim, C. (2016): Cartographic morphocode.com/the-5-minute-walk/
Grounds. Projecting the Landscape Imaginary. New
York: Princeton Architectural Press. Morphocode. Urban performance measures. https://
morphocode.com/urban-performance-measures/
El-Geneidy, A., Grimsrud, M., Wasfi, R., Tétreault, P., &
Surprenant Legault, J. (2014). New evidence on Ricklin, A., Shah, S. (2017). Metrics for Planning

walking distances to transit stops: Identifying Healthy Communities. Washington, DC: American

redundancies and gaps using variable service areas. Planning Association.

Transportation, 41(1), 193-210.

Semler, C. et al. (2016). Guidebook for developing

Grant, M., D'Ignazio, J., Bond, A., McKeeman, A. pedestrian & bicycle performance measures. (Final

(2013). Performance Based Planning and report No. FHWA-HEP-16-037). Washington, DC: U.S.

Programming Guidebook. Report No. FHWA- Department of Transportation, Federal Highway

HEP-13-041. Administration.

Hajna, S., Dasgupta, K., Joseph, L. and Ross, N. (2014) Twaddell, H. et al. (2018). Guidebook for Measuring

“A Call for Caution and Transparency in the Multimodal Network Connectivity. (Report No.

Calculation of Land Use Mix”, Health & Place, 29: 79– FHWA-HEP-18-032) Washington, D.C.: Federal

83. Highway Administration.

Langdon, P. (2017). Within Walking Distance: U.S. Department of Transportation. (2002). National

Creating Livable Communities for All. Washington,. Survey of Pedestrian and Bicyclist Attitudes and

D.C.: Island Press. Behaviors. Washington, DC: National Highway Traffic

Safety Administration and Bureau of Transportation
Mehaffy, M. W., Porta, S., & Romice, O. (2015). The Statistics.
"neighborhood unit" on trial: a case study of the
impacts of urban morphology. Journal of Urbanism, U.S. Green Building Council. (2018) . LEED v4 for

8 (2). pp. 199-217. ISSN 1754-9183 Neighborhood Development.

http://explorer.morphocode.com 29
 Learn with
Morphocode
Morphocode Academy is an online school that You can also check out our video course Mapping
covers topics in data visualization, creative coding, Urban Data. It contains 30 carefully organized and
and urban informatics. You can visit the academy beautifully illustrated videos that will lay a solid
page to learn more about the use of color in maps, foundation for your mapping skills.
what are the most popular tools for data exploration,
and how to use python to do data analysis. www.morphocode.com/academy

http://explorer.morphocode.com 30
Exploring cities
through data analysis
and visualization

MORPHOCODE Morphocode is a design and development firm that

uses data to visualize urban dynamics. Our team
brings together expertise across architecture, urban
planning, and software engineering. We build data-
driven dashboards, create beautiful interactive
experiences, and make custom tools for data analysis
and visualization.

To learn more, visit www.morphocode.com or

follow us on Twitter @morphocode

http://explorer.morphocode.com 31
explorer.morphocode.com