Visualization to support decision-making in cities: advances, technology, challenges, and opportunities

Data is a valuable asset to the management of a city. With the growing integration of technology, some tools help to collect, process, and visualize urban data, aiding the interpretation and understanding of how urban systems work. Despite the wide use of visualization to support decision-making in urban management, the understanding of urban data visualization in cities is limited in the current literature. Therefore, this paper analyzes the relevant body of literature to identify the advances in information visualization for decision-making in cities, the visualization technology used, and the areas of opportunity in the field of study. As a result of this analysis, we identified eleven visualization technologies used for urban data visualization. The literature review suggests that specialized visualization tools do not consider the users and their real needs. For this reason, we recommend incorporating the User-Centered Design approach in urban data visualization design.