The Masterplan

I’ll never forget the day I downloaded my first Twitter dataset. I was a student working on a submission, it was late at night and I was trying to find a way to make a map of what the citizens of Barcelona were saying on Twitter about their city. I was working hard on making my algorithm work until I got that damn line of code just right, clicked on “Run” and boom: my spreadsheet started to be fil...

In 2015 India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched a national “Smart Cities Mission”, an urban renewal program with the goal to develop smart cities across the sub-continent, making them citizen friendly and sustainable. The mission initially included 100 cities, with the deadline for completion of the projects set between 2019 and 2023. As of August 2022, which is when I’m recording this episo...

As a kid, one of my favorite books was Heaven & earth: Unseen by the naked eye by Katherine Roucoux . It showed - chapter by chapter - intricate landscapes of increasing scale and distance, captured by microscopes, x-rays, satellites and telescopes. Each photograph was accompanied by an extended caption that explained it in detail, offering a dose of scientific information connecting it to the...