Preface to the focus section: Making places: visualization, interaction and experience in urban space

Cities are exciting and people continue to be drawn to urban areas because of the choices that cities offer in all areas of economic and social life. Large-scale sensor networks and pervasive computing technologies are transforming our city environments, augmenting them with increasingly powerful networked technologies and media. This raises the question of how these technologies can play a part in improving the use of the spaces that already exist in the urban environment and, critically, what roles information visualization and interaction design have in these “future” or “smart” cities. In this emergent domain visualizations are becoming especially relevant, as they are the tangible outcomes of these systems, while interaction design can be the enabler for citizens to engage with this urban data.