The Newcastle Urban Observatory, led by Professor Philip James at Newcastle University, is the UK’s largest urban monitoring programme, offering an unprecedented window into the life of a modern city. Based at Newcastle Helix and led by Newcastle University, the Observatory uses over 4,000 sensors to collect real-time data on everything from air quality and noise to energy use, traffic, and biodiversity.
At its core, the Urban Observatory is about understanding how cities work—and how they can work better. By gathering over 10 billion data points and making them openly available, the Observatory empowers researchers, local authorities, businesses, and citizens to make informed decisions that improve urban life.
What They Do
The Observatory collects and analyses data across more than 60 environmental and social indicators. These include:
- Air quality and pollution
- Traffic flow and pedestrian movement
- Energy consumption
- Noise levels
- Weather and climate
- Biodiversity and green space usage
This data is gathered using a network of sensors placed throughout the North East, updating as frequently as every second. The result is a living, breathing digital model of the city that reflects its rhythms, challenges, and opportunities in real time.
Why It Matters
Cities are complex systems. To tackle issues like climate change, public health, and sustainable transport, we need accurate, timely information. The Urban Observatory provides exactly that—helping to shape smarter policies, more efficient infrastructure, and healthier communities.
For example, data from the Observatory has been used to:
- Support low-emission transport planning
- Monitor the impact of green infrastructure
- Inform flood risk management
- Evaluate the effectiveness of smart city technologies
Open Data for Everyone
One of the Observatory’s founding principles is open access. All data is freely available through an online portal and API, making it easy for anyone, from school students to data scientists, to explore and use. Whether you’re a researcher modelling urban heat islands or a resident curious about air quality on your street, the tools are at your fingertips.
A Platform for Innovation
The Observatory is a key partner in major national projects, including the AI Hub for real-time data and the DARe programme for decarbonised transport. It supports over 50 research projects and has attracted more than £60 million in funding, helping to position Newcastle as a global leader in urban science.
Explore the City Like Never Before
Whether you’re a policymaker, a business innovator, a student, or a curious resident, the Newcastle Urban Observatory invites you to explore the city through data.
Newcastle Urban Observatory website
Case Studies from the Newcastle Urban Observatory
This project’s vision is to turn the cameras already watching our city streets into privacy-safe observers that help us understand how people get around, stay healthy, and support the local economy. Software added to the cameras quietly counts how many people are walking, cycling or scooting. The program running on the cameras without releasing any imagery of videos – only sending data about numbers of people moving in front of its view. Over time, this builds a clear picture on when and where people are busy going to places.
People moving in front of the cameras leave a virtual trace as they pass through, and we use these traces to create movement prediction models that tell us how likely people are to take a specific route. In a way, we predict the extension of their current path, into the future. That lets us detect if changes to arrangements of street objects also affect how people move through these spaces.
We also use our sensors to learn about how people are moving. By looking at the way body parts shift from frame to frame, we can estimate things like walking speed, cadence and stride length. These measurements tell us if people can cross safely at a busy intersection, if someone have difficulty walking, how prevalent is that in larger population and if there is any relationship between movement characteristics and some aspects of the urban landscape they navigate.
With access to additional environmental and historical events data, we can estimate active travel on future dates. Using weather forecasts and planned events calendar we can predict how rain, wind, holidays or special events will impact activity of people in the city. By looking at past patterns, our systems learn and extend that knowledge onto how current or expected conditions will be.
Altogether, these sensing, analytical and forecasting capabilities can transform passive video observation into an actionable data ecosystem. City planners can see where footpaths and crossings need improvements, and they can test ideas as like changes to signal timing or additional benches and have immediate feedback about success through observed behaviours. Health experts will benefit from longitudinal gait assessment, informing geographically targeted interventions and observation of population-scale trends. Store owners and event organisers can match their opening hours or staffing to the times when the most visitors can be expected.
By using the vision infrastructure we can safely and respectfully create a living map of city life, helping make streets healthier, safer and more vibrant for social activities and bustling local economy.
