779Z-PerformaTeamitive-Urbanlytics

🌟 Inspiration When some of our teammates had to relocate for internships, we realized how difficult it is to move to a new city without knowing what each neighbourhood is truly like. Online research can only go so far - you often need local insights to understand if an area is safe at night, how good the air quality is, how expensive housing can get, or how accessible transit is. We found no single platform that brought all this data together - that realization inspired Urbanlytics, a one-stop hub for neighbourhood analytics.

💡 What It Does Urbanlytics is a data-driven neighbourhood analytics platform that helps people explore and compare communities within a city. It provides a map-based dashboard where users can view: Crime rates and safety scores Air pollution and livability metrics Average housing costs and transit accessibility Overall community insights in one visual interface

Whether you’re moving, planning, or researching - Urbanlytics helps you make informed, data-backed decisions about where to live.

🛠️ How We Built It We built Urbanlytics using: Next.js + TypeScript for a performant, modular frontend Leaflet for interactive heat maps and geospatial rendering Tailwind CSS for a clean, accessible design Open APIs like Socrata (crime data), IQAir (air quality), and RentFaster (housing data) for real-time analytics

Each community’s data is stored in a structured JSON format, dynamically loaded into the sidebar for interactive exploration.

🚧 Challenges We Ran Into Integrating multiple APIs with inconsistent data structures and time formats. Aligning map coordinates and community boundaries accurately within Mapbox. Balancing performance and detail when loading hundreds of data points at once. Designing a UI that remains intuitive while displaying complex, multi-layered analytics.

🏆 Accomplishments We’re Proud Of Creating a fully functional interactive prototype in a short hackathon timeline. Building a consistent data model that merges multiple open datasets into one dashboard. Designing a clear and modern UI that makes urban analytics approachable for everyone. Turning a real-life problem - the challenge of relocating - into a practical, scalable solution.

🧠 What We Learned How to integrate open city data into usable, visual insights. How to structure scalable geo-analytics dashboards using Next.js and Mapbox. The importance of human-centered design when presenting data that impacts real-life decisions. How technology can make urban living safer, smarter, and more transparent.

🚀 What’s Next for 779Z-PerformaTeamitive - Urbanlytics Expanding beyond Calgary to support multi-city comparisons. Adding predictive analytics for housing affordability and crime trends. Integrating real-time IoT data (e.g., sensors for noise, air, and traffic). Building user accounts for saving and comparing neighbourhoods. Partnering with municipalities to make urban data more open and actionable.

Built With

• ai
• api
• calgary
• git
• github
• leaflet.js
• next
• typescript
• vscode