Mapping the Pulse of Urban Life

About the Project

Public squares cannot be replicated by copying their physical form. What makes a space work, what draws people in, keeps them there, and makes it feel alive, is a layered combination of movement, commerce, culture, smell, mood, and habit that no floor plan captures on its own.

This project grew out of that question. Ahmedabad is an intensely social city, and this municipal market square was a place where that social life was visibly concentrated. Our team set out to map it in full: not just the layout and footfall, but the scent corridors, the emotional atmosphere, the non-human occupants, and the informal economies operating alongside the formal ones. The goal was to give urban designers and the city a deeper understanding of what actually made this square work, so that future design and redesign decisions could preserve the attributes that matter and do justice to the architecture and culture of the communities they serve.

The result was a set of maps that together tell a story no single map could.

A collaborative work by Chitra Ahuja, Pooja Mewada, Pooja Nagaraj, Rinal Mistry, Saloni Shah, and Zalak Patel.

My Role

Over four weeks, I worked with the team on the ground collecting observational data across the market square, covering everything from pedestrian movement and crowd density to scent distribution and mood. I then led the data cleanup and designed the final visualizations, including the color systems, map renders, and the visual language that ties the full set together.

Shop Layout & Ambiance

The base map documents the types of shops and the overall ambiance of the market during periods of moderate activity. It is the foundation on which all other maps are built.

Measuring the Square

Documenting the physical dimensions, surface materials, and proportions of the space that govern how people move through and inhabit it.

Movement Patterns

The market accommodates a variety of shops offering different types of goods, but not all experience the same level of customer activity. This map visualizes how people move through the square between 10am and 11pm, revealing which routes are most trafficked and which shops draw the most footfall.

Traffic & Access

Adjacent to one of Ahmedabad's busiest streets, the square constantly negotiates with vehicular traffic. This map traces the routes, frequencies, and types of vehicles that pass through or park within the market area throughout the day.

Crowd Distribution

The square doesn't fill evenly. This map captures how density shifts across the day: which pockets fill first, which remain quiet, and how the space breathes between the morning, afternoon, and evening crowds. The pattern reveals not just where people go, but which parts of the square are doing the most social work.

Scent Distribution

Documenting the distribution of food aromas across the square by morning and evening. Scent is invisible but powerful: it draws people, signals activity, and shapes the character of different corners of the space in ways no floor plan can capture.

Emotional Atmosphere

Urban surveys rarely attempt to document feeling. This map records the observed moods of people within the market square on a weekday, mapping where energy concentrates, where people linger in conversation, where the pace quickens, and where the square invites rest.

Non-Human Inhabitants

The market is not only a human space. Pigeons, crows, squirrels, and dogs move through it on their own terms, following food, shade, and familiar routes. This map traces the movement patterns of the square's non-human occupants, making visible a layer of urban life that is always present but almost never acknowledged.

Identification of Sellers

The final map identifies and categorizes the sellers operating within the square: formal shop owners, informal vendors, and itinerant traders. Together they form the economic ecosystem of the market, revealing how different types of commerce coexist within a single public space.

What the Maps Revealed Together

No single map could have told this story. It was only when the layers were placed on top of each other that the square's logic became visible.

Scent turned out to be one of the most powerful forces in the space. People who came in for clothing or a toy consistently reported stopping for street food on the way out, pulled in by aromas they hadn't planned around. The smell map wasn't a curiosity, it was a record of one of the square's most effective commercial forces.

The trees told a similar story about heat. In a city as warm as Ahmedabad, shade isn't a passive feature of a public space, it's what determines where people go in the afternoon. The density maps made that visible: midday footfall concentrated almost entirely around the tree canopy, and the rest of the square quieted until the temperature dropped.

Time revealed a different set of occupants entirely. The wildlife maps captured what happens when the human crowds thin out: early morning and late at night, pigeons, crows, squirrels, and dogs reclaimed the square on their own terms, following routes and rhythms that ran parallel to ours all along.

And almost no one came for just one thing. The movement patterns showed it clearly: a visitor who arrived for a single purchase almost always moved through multiple shops before leaving. The square worked because it gave people reasons to stay longer than they intended.