During the Welcome Week, the Urban School offered its students a workshop dedicated to an introduction to data visualisation. This workshop aimed to introduce them to the fundamentals of visual data representation, an essential tool for analysing and understanding urban dynamics.

Divided into groups, the students worked with data sets provided by the OFCE and used various software programmes to produce a series of representations of the city of Marseille based on four themes: 

• To what extent can Marseille be considered a 15-minute city?
• Heat and inequality in Marseille
• Is the 15-minute city accessible to all? Access to facilities for senior citizens
• Inequalities in access to swimming
   

The workshop was led by  Giorgio Uboldi, co-founder of Calibro, a Milan-based design studio that aims to adapt visual tools to explore and visualise data, complex information and archives, and by Xavier Timbeau, senior director of the French Economic Observatory (OFCE). Donato Ricci, head of design research at Sciences Po's medialab, who designed the workshop with the Urban School, also spoke.

"The results were interesting. Even though it was done in three days, the students really put a lot of effort into producing a visualisation that can be meaningful in understanding different phenomena related to this idea of the 15-minute city." Giorgio Uboldi

This workshop enabled students to deepen their mastery of certain software and data analysis methods, but also to realise that data visualisation was a valuable tool for sparking debate and asking the right questions, rather than a means of providing definitive answers to complex problems.

This workshop was designed in partnership with the OFCE and Medialab and with the support of the TIERED (Transforming Interdisciplinary Education and Research for Evolving Democracies) project, a strategic institutional project at Sciences Po that aims to respond to the challenges facing democratic systems in a context of significant environmental and digital transformations. TIERED is funded by a French government grant managed by the National Research Agency as part of the France 2030 programme.