A city looks after itself in a thousand small acts nobody sees. A drain gets cleared. A light gets fixed. A pothole that someone reported on a Tuesday is gone by Friday. It happens constantly, all around you, and it is almost entirely invisible.
Pulse makes it visible. It is live now at solveto.ca/pulse for Toronto and Mississauga.
Toronto, rebuilt from its own data.
What it is
Pulse is the city at night (other modes such as dusk and day), rebuilt as a living map. The buildings, the roads, the trees, the infrastructure running under the streets, all of it drawn from over a million of the city’s own open data points and SolveTO’s own data. You are not looking at a stock map with pins dropped on top. You are looking at your actual city, the one you walk through, rendered as itself.
Then the reports arrive. Every report residents have filed glows where it happened, and the map replays them through time. You watch the city light up one report at a time, weeks of civic life compressed into something you can take in at a glance. A street you know lights up. Then the one next to it. Then a corner across town you have never visited but somebody there cared enough to report.
Every glow is a report someone took thirty seconds to file.
This is the part 311 was never built to show you. The work gets done in silence. Pulse turns the silence into something you can watch.
Take the tour
There is a Tour that flies you through the city’s real story with sound. You sit back and the city tells you what has been happening in it. Where the reports cluster. Where the activity runs hot. What a season of residents paying attention actually looks like from above.
I will admit the first time I flew it down over the lake toward downtown I did the Superman arms at my desk. The cape comes off fast, though. What you are flying over is not a game. It is every problem your neighbours reported and every one the city went back and fixed, a different way to see what is actually happening in your city.
It is the same data that powers every report on the platform, the million-plus pieces of public infrastructure already on one map, only now you experience it as a place instead of a database.
The tour flies you through the city’s story. Press play.
Get down close and the city is alive. Cars move along the streets you know. A red and white TTC streetcar rolls past and you hear it rumble by underneath you, the city humming under all of it. People are gathered where people actually gather, in Nathan Phillips Square outside City Hall, in Sankofa Square, down in the Distillery District, at the foot of the CN Tower. Fly low enough and the map stops being a map and turns into a Tuesday night in your city.
On a phone the Tour does the flying for you. To take the controls and fly it yourself, open Pulse on a desktop. The phone still lets you drag to look around and pinch to zoom into the 3D city.
Put your name on a building
A few buildings on this map carry a name. The Reference Library carries mine, and so does the stadium. Your name, or your business’s, on a building you care about, with your logo on it, lit up for everyone who flies past.
Your name, on a building you care about.
It is the kind of small thing that makes a city feel like yours instead of a place you happen to live. The first time I put my name on a building I care about, the map stopped being a product I built and started being a neighbourhood I belong to.
Only a few carry a name at a time, and it is something you arrange with me. You hold it for a season, then it passes to the next. If you want yours on the map, reach out.
Take credit for the fix
When a report turns green, the map throws a small celebration. The animation kicks in, a crew rolls up to the spot, the work happens, and a flag goes up where everyone flying past can see it. The city saying thank you, out loud, in lights.
When it gets fixed, the city celebrates the people who fixed it.
The crew that does that work is often not the city. It is a private company, a contractor, someone who showed up and fixed the thing. They earn the credit and almost never get it.
I want to change that. If you fixed something on this map, I want your name or your company’s on that exact report, with your logo, beside the flag that says it was solved. Solved, and solved by you. Public credit on the one thing you are proud of, in front of the whole city.
If that is you, reach out. Same as a building, it is something you arrange with me, not a free badge you grab. You did the work. Your name should be on it.
Why I built it
Reporting a problem is an act of faith. You send something into the city and you have to believe it lands somewhere, that someone reads it, that the street gets better because you bothered. Most of the time you never see proof. So most people stop believing, and then they stop reporting.
Pulse or Superman mode is the proof. It is thousands of those acts of faith, lit up across a city that is quietly answering them. Not residents against the city and not the city ignoring residents. A city and the people in it, looking after the same streets, finally visible doing it together.
Pull back far enough and the glows become one picture.
Pulse does not replace the report you file or the call you make to 311. It sits alongside them and shows you what all of it adds up to.
Go fly over your city, Superman. It is at solveto.ca/pulse, and the controls are yours on a desktop. Find your street, find your building, and watch the place light up. You helped build that map without knowing it.
