On Dollar Slices, Pizza Vectors, Prosciutto Zones and Topping Hyperspace

At Topos, we are fascinated by exactly this type of variation and believe it provides a powerful view into the culture of a location. While data sources like the United States Census are useful for understanding broad demographic trends over decades, they give little insight into what defines the moment-to-moment culture of a city, a neighborhood, a street corner. Inspired by thinkers like Walter Benjamin, who, in his unfinished Arcades Project examined subjects as varied as fashion, construction materials, poetry, lighting, and mirrors in order to understand Paris in the 19th century, we are fascinated by the way seemingly simple, ubiquitous subjects like the coffee we drink or the concerts we go to define a place. However, unlike Benjamin, we are interested in constructing this understanding in a way that can dynamically scale across the globe, allowing us to understand how different locations relate to one another, and how locations evolve in real time. To achieve this, we use data from dozens of different sources and techniques from a wide range of technologies and disciplines including computer vision, natural language processing, statistics, machine learning, network science, topology, architecture and urbanism.