Every Urban Pulse term, in one sentence.

An open 100-metre-resolution gridded population dataset. Used as a fallback when Eurostat / GHSL has no NUTS-3 cell for the audit isochrone.

How many of life's six daily needs (living, working, shopping, care, learning, enjoying) you can reach on foot in 15 minutes.

Why it mattersHigher means residents walk for daily life instead of driving.

Anonymised, aggregated walking and cycling counts published from Strava activity. We use it as a live signal of active-mode demand on a street network.

The chance, in any given year, that a rainfall event large enough to flood this catchment will occur.

The catchment we score — the shape on the map drawn around your pin.

Residents most exposed to harm from the hazard — typically the over-65s, under-5s, and people with respiratory or cardiovascular conditions.

Mayor / Planner / Analyst — same numbers, different depth. Mayor shows the headline, Analyst shows every sub-input.

An estimate of how many deaths a year are linked to this hazard, expressed per 100,000 residents so it's comparable across cities.

How visually engaging the building fronts are at street level — active frontages keep streets lively and safer.

Public-good POIs that anchor a neighborhood — libraries, community centres, places of worship, town halls, public squares. Adds civic depth on top of the daily-needs/lifestyle balance.

The standard latitude/temperature/rainfall scheme that splits the world into climate zones (Mediterranean, Continental, Atlantic, Nordic). Anchors our heat / air / noise / housing baselines until live rasters are wired.

How much we trust this audit's numbers, based on data coverage (POIs, transit, parks, population) and any human overrides applied.

Daily-refreshed regional cuts of OpenStreetMap published by Geofabrik. We pull these instead of the raw planet file so POI extraction stays cheap and reproducible.

POIs people need most days — supermarkets, pharmacies, GP clinics, primary schools, post offices, banks. The numerator on the daily-needs side of the Essentials/Lifestyle Ratio.

How well a neighborhood balances everyday essentials (groceries, clinics, schools) against lifestyle amenities (cafés, bars, gyms).

Why it mattersToo few essentials means residents drive for milk; too few lifestyle places means the area is a commuter dormitory.

Average outdoor noise across a 24-hour day, with extra weight on evening and night hours, measured in decibels.

Why it mattersWHO advises road-traffic Lden stays at or below 53 dB.

A logarithmic loudness scale: a quiet library is ~30 dB, normal conversation ~60 dB, busy traffic ~75 dB. Every +3 dB roughly doubles the sound energy.

POIs people choose for leisure or culture — cafés, restaurants, bars, gyms, cinemas, galleries. The numerator on the lifestyle side of the Essentials/Lifestyle Ratio.

EU sustainable-mobility planning sets an indicative ceiling of 40% of trips made by car.

ECMWF's ERA5 reanalysis — a continuous, gridded record of European surface temperature, rainfall and wind from 1940 onward, distributed via Copernicus C3S.

The European Copernicus programme's Sentinel satellite family — used here for surface-temperature (S-3 SLSTR) and air-pollution (S-5P TROPOMI) overlays.

The EU's flagship household survey on income, poverty and housing costs — used here to benchmark rent-to-income ratios.

The EU's official noise-mapping method used for strategic noise maps under the Environmental Noise Directive.

The EU's standard sub-national geography (roughly: a province or county).

Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan — the EU framework cities use to set car-use, transit and active-travel targets.

The EU body that publishes the strategic noise maps, air-quality assessments and flood-directive datasets we benchmark against.

How much hotter the surface here gets, on a summer day, compared to the wider city.

Average extra minutes a car trip takes here compared to a free-flowing baseline.

Tiny airborne particles (≤2.5 µm) that lodge deep in the lungs. WHO 2021 advises an annual average of 5 µg/m³ or less.

An open archive of regulatory air-quality monitor readings (PM2.5, NO₂, O₃) from cities worldwide, refreshed hourly.

The European Commission's global gridded settlement-and-population dataset.

How much vegetation (trees, parks, swales) softens a downpour by absorbing rain before it reaches the drains.

The share of ground covered by roofs, roads and pavements — water can't soak in, which raises flood risk.

Modeled €/resident/yr loss from cloudburst flooding, blending impervious-cover share, green-cover sponge effect and exposed population.

Why it mattersHigher loss intensity means basements, ground-floor shops and transit tunnels are more likely to flood in a 1-in-10-year downpour.

Nights when the temperature stays above 20 °C — bad for sleep, recovery and the elderly.

The travel mode (walk, cycle, transit, drive) and time budget (e.g. 15 min) used to draw the catchment around the pin — every indicator is computed inside this reach.

Why it mattersBigger reach pulls in more amenities and more residents; What-If interventions like a protected bike lane or bus-priority lane can extend reach without moving the pin.

Where this neighborhood ranks against a panel of structurally similar cities (0 = bottom, 100 = top).

A 1–5 score for how comfortable, safe and varied it is to walk these streets.

The square-kilometre area of the isochrone polygon — all POIs, residents, and risk indicators are aggregated inside this footprint.

Why it mattersBigger area normalises POI counts to per-km² density so dense urban cores don't auto-win on raw counts; the Spatial Diff page quantifies how an intervention stack expands or contracts it.

The skin temperature of streets, roofs and pavements measured by satellite — what bare feet, tyres and shaded benches actually feel.

Why it mattersHotter surfaces drive the urban heat-island effect and night-time discomfort.

‘Live’ pulls real measurements (Sentinel, OpenAQ); ‘Estimate’ uses a deterministic model when live data isn't available for this AOI.

Provides the basemap, geocoding (place search), and the walking/cycling/transit isochrones that draw the reach area on the map.

Whether this audit was scored under the current methodology version or an older one. Stale audits can be re-run from /portfolio.

A 0–100 score of how evenly different types of places are mixed along the street.

The annual public-cost band — health, lost time, climate damage — that today's neighborhood configuration is generating, with a low / central / high range to be honest about uncertainty.

NASA's POWER project — daily satellite-derived surface temperature and climate records used here for live heat readings.

Average outdoor noise during night hours (23:00–07:00), measured in decibels.

Why it mattersAbove 45 dB Lnight, sleep disturbance starts to rise.

Traffic-related gas linked to asthma and cardiovascular disease. WHO 2021 advises an annual average of 10 µg/m³ or less.

How many decibels Lden quieter the street becomes after measures like low-noise asphalt, 30 km/h zones, façade glazing or a bus-priority lane that shifts traffic.

Why it mattersEvery 3 dB Lden reduction roughly halves the sound energy reaching residents and lifts sleep-disturbance risk back toward WHO guidance.

A community-maintained world map. We pull the points-of-interest mix (shops, schools, clinics, parks) from its public extract.

A crowd-sourced street-level image dataset (CC-BY-SA). We sample it to score walkability, tree canopy and façade quality.

A named planning move (protected bike lane, bus priority, tree canopy…) drawn from the catalog, each with cost, lead time and expected score change.

General Transit Feed Specification — the open standard agencies publish their stops, routes and timetables in. We use it (and OpenMobilityData mirrors) for transit-frequency baselines.

Two human-tunable levers — depave / permeable surfaces and added green cover (SuDS, bioswales, tree pits) — that reduce how much stormwater runs off into drains.

Why it mattersDrag the sliders to model retrofits without re-running the audit; the map heatmap and €/resident/yr loss recalculate live.

The shape on the map showing everywhere you can get to within X minutes by foot, bike or transit.

Households spending more than 40% of income on rent and utilities (Eurostat threshold).

Why it mattersA standard EU indicator of displacement risk.

Share of a typical tenant household's income that goes to rent. Eurostat flags households above 40% as cost-overburdened.

A 0–100 composite of how well the neighborhood absorbs shocks (heat, flood, noise, displacement).

ESA's Sentinel-5P satellite instrument that measures pollutant columns (NO₂, ozone, methane) from orbit at ~5 km resolution.

Why it mattersCross-checks ground-station readings so a clean station doesn't hide a polluted catchment.

Estimated share of residents who report being highly annoyed by traffic noise.

What fraction of all daily trips in the catchment are taken by private car.

How varied and lively the street life is, measured by mix of uses, density and small-block grain (after Jane Jacobs, 1961).

A 1–5 average of three street qualities — how walkable it is, how much tree shade it has, and how engaging the building fronts are.

A signed URL that lets a non-staff person open this audit's report for a set window. Revoke any time.

Building homes, shops and services close to frequent public transport so residents need a car less often.

POIs that let residents move without a car — bus stops, tram halts, metro entrances, train stations, bike-share docks, car-share bays. Counts the mode options inside the catchment.

The share of the street that's shaded by tree canopy in summer — direct relief from heat.

Cities trap and re-radiate heat — dense, paved areas can run several degrees hotter than the surrounding countryside, especially at night.

Why it mattersHotter nights raise heatstroke risk for older residents and push up cooling bills.

A live preview that shifts a few human-tunable levers (rent mix, green cover, acoustic retrofit) and re-scores instantly.

World Health Organization's 2021 air-quality guideline values — PM2.5 ≤ 5 µg/m³ and NO₂ ≤ 10 µg/m³ as annual averages.

WHO Europe (2018) advises road-traffic Lden no higher than 53 dB to protect health.

Sets the health-protective thresholds we score against — air quality (2021 AQG), road-traffic noise (2018), and heat mortality (Europe 2021).