Metroverse
The Metroverse is a tool developed by the Harvard Growth Labs - a research lab focused on understanding economic growth and development in cities around the world. Metroverse is designed to allow the user to explore various economic features of their chosen city. A very important and useful feature of the application is that it allows users to not only view economic information for their own city, but also allows them to compare these metrics with those of other cities around the world, and in that, users can find cities that have similar metric results as theirs. Metroverse also allows users to see each city’s technological capabilities, and correlate them to its economic advancements, which ones relate to the city's advancement and which ones seem to have no relation to it. It highlights all the city’s advancements, and in turn its growth prospects. The website suggests that “the Metroverse makes visible what a city is good at today to help understand what it can become tomorrow.”
The goal of the tool is to look at the development of cities in alignment with the Economic Complexity Analysis - it shows information about the city’s knowledge base and strengths in terms of industries in which the city is active. A better understanding of the strong suits of a city helps in the development, by learning which areas the city is lacking in and then expanding into new ventures. New trends do not come up out of nowhere, therefore, to truly learn a city’s potential, it is important to understand the diversification potential that is embedded in its current industrial structure.
How was the data collected?
The data for Metroverse is Dun and Bradstreet’s World Base for the year 2020. The data records information about establishments all over the world which was cleaned and prepared by the metroverse team before its aggregation for the visualization. Dun and Bradstreet’s world base data contains data information for 200+ countries and is constantly updated throughout the year. This data is collected from a number of different sources such as Public Registries, Newspapers and Publications, Business websites, and financial records throughout the year, and with constant accuracy testing and updates. The Metroverse team made use of this proprietary data available from Dun and Bradstreet’s data cloud.
Users
The Metroverse is designed to aid decision-making in cities and to showcase the strengths and weaknesses of the city in order to make the best decision to improve the quality of life in the cities. It is designed with decision-makers in mind, to be used by policymakers, urban planners, and data analysts. Since it is a prototype, the tool was made in collaboration with a pilot testing group consisting of individuals from these lines of businesses and is being improved to make the information better accessible to them.
Questions
1. what are some basic economic traits of my city?
This is the landing page for each city selected from the Metroverse homepage, and it displays an overview of the city as well as some of the concepts used in the visualization. It also displays the relative location of the city on the map and other menu options. I think it is very useful to have the definition of the concepts available on the bottom right box, the user also has the option to hover over the (i) near the data and see the concept defined as a pop up too.
The page also displays information about which other cities are similar in their knowledge base as the one we’re interested in, Chicago for this example. Users can compare any cities they like, but the recommendations are based on whether they are competitive in the same industry base and their size. They believe it makes sense to compare metropolitan cities like New York City, Tokyo, Buenos Aires or Bengaluru to other large cities and not to small towns and vice versa. Users can also understand how they define city boundaries and map them, since the city highlighted on the map includes some of the neighboring areas as well.
2. what is my city's economic composition?
Users can select from the various menu options on the collapsible sidebar to answer their questions. For this question, we select the “what is my city’s economic composition”.
This is what the landing page for economic composition looks like. The page contains an expandable treemap visualization, with colors I think are very cohesive, and representative of the sectors they represent. Each color represents a knowledge sector, or similar industries grouped together under an umbrella term, and each box represents an industry in that knowledge sector. The sizes of the box represent their contribution to the total employment, which can be seen at the top right of the treemap. The page also consists of a help button that has directions on how to read the treemap. The legend at the bottom serves two purposes - it shows which knowledge sector it represents, as well as acts as a filter to the treemap. Users can hide certain sectors in order to just look at the industries they are interested in, or they can single out a particular sector and just look at industries in that.
3. how does my city’s economic composition compare to other cities?
Users can click on this question on the side menu, and this is what the landing page looks like!
The main purpose of this page is to compare the economic composition of the selected city with its peers. These peers are cities from around the world with similar population compositions. Users also have the option to select cities that they would like to compare the selected city with, from the CHANGE PEER GROUP option - which has a lot of options to select cities based on regional or global benchmarks or select their own set of cities from the menu.
The bar chart in the center uses the same color scheme from the treemap visualization, which I think helps towards cohesivity since this tool contains such a huge amount of information. It is an expandable bar chart that shows the top industries by default. The users have an option to expand the bar graph into a scrollable chart to view all the industries the city has, which is really helpful because the non-prominent industries do not have a lot of information. Hovering over a bar in the chart gives information about that particular industry, such as the NAICS code, the year of the data, and the relative presence in comparison to other cities.
The users also have the option to see the absolute presence of Chicago in the industries, which gives the user the opportunity to select their preferred visualization as well. The descriptions for each of the presences can be seen by hovering over the names.
The text on the right summarizes the information available via visualization, and also describes the legends and what the information describes. I think it is beneficial to have a description, since a lot of people depend on textual instructions to find out about the uses of the tool.
4. what is my city’s position in the industry space?
I clicked on the (How to read this) option for this particular chart, and the pop-up describes everything a user would need to know in order to use this visualization, which I think is really important to have, especially for users who are not familiar with business analytics. The target audience for this tool comes from all sorts of different backgrounds.
Similar to the previous pages, I think the cohesive color schemes and the choice of visualization tools do very well in describing the data the users are looking for.
This is a zoomed-in view of the knowledge sectors. The distance between markers shows how close the industries are to each other, and the size of the markers determines their size. It is also easy to visually group similar industries together using the color scheme.
This page also contains information about the visualization on the right side, along with a legend for the node sizes on the map.
Users have the opportunity to change the settings for the visualization as well, such as displaying the knowledge clusters as map overlay in place of nodes. The users can also size the nodes using different criteria.
Conclusion
Metroverse is in it’s testing phase, so there are a lot of features that remain to be added. Also, since the data has been obtained from one sources, the only countries available for viewing are the ones that are available in the dataset. Additionally, there is a discrepancy in the population data, which shows data for population in 2015, whereas the other information available is for 2020.