The Climate Puzzle

Visualizing New York City’s carbon footprint

Cities like NYC are nicknamed the “concrete jungle” for a reason — they’re often associated with traffic, pollution, and artificiality. However, data shows that cities are the most efficient and environmentally friendly places to live due to the close proximity of people and places. This visualization attempts to tell a story through data and make people think harder about the relationship between our habitat and the environment.

Year: 2023

Location: New York City, USA

Who do we blame?Cities produce the highest amount of CO₂per square mile. However, using land area as a measurement does not account for population density. When you measure CO₂ emissions per household, the result is the complete opposite: city dwellers have the lowest carbon footprint while the suburbs have the highest.

Source: The Center for Neighborhood Technology

DatasetCoolClimate is an organization at the University of Berkeley, California, and specializes in climate research. Their website features an interactive map that displays household carbon footprints for every ZIP code in the United States.

The data is based on the following paper:
Christopher M. Jones and Daniel M. Kammen, Spatial Distribution of U.S. Household Carbon Footprints Reveals Suburbanization Undermines Greenhouse Gas Benefits of Urban Population Density. Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, dx.doi.org/10.1021/es4034364.

Source: coolclimate.org/maps

PrototypeI planned to recreate a map of New York City using wood pieces, but showcase the data by counties rather than ZIP codes. This is because some ZIP code areas are too small and would not be practical for this project.

Mapping the dataI added up all the ZIP code areas and averaged them for each county. I then created a scale of different grey-values using the original scale from the data source and condensed it to five values.

Each piece of wood was laser cut and rasterized at the OCADU Rapid Prototyping Centre. Moss was glued onto the pieces representing areas with less than 45 tCO2e/household.

Final Photography This piece reminded me of a diorama or a terrarium found in a scientific lab, which I emphasized by using a clean white background and bright lighting. I used angles similar to aerial photographs of a city, as if the viewer is flying and looking down from the sky.