About walkthru.earth
Building a new kind of index for cities — measuring not just cost of living, but stress, safety, connection, and the ease of everyday life.
Cities are measured by spreadsheets — GDP, property values, traffic flow. Those numbers tell us nothing about whether a child is thriving, a resident is chronically stressed, or a neighborhood is truly livable.
The city is processing you
Every day, you walk through your city. You notice the traffic, the buildings, the shops — but you likely don't notice what the environment is doing to you. Chronic noise keeps your cortisol high. Poor air quality wears down your lungs. Heat islands make entire neighborhoods unlivable in summer.
Because we ignore these hidden patterns, our bodies stay in survival mode. We wanted to change that.
A fitness tracker for cities
Today, cities only check their “bank balance” (GDP) to see if they're doing well. Walkthru.earth is like a fitness tracker for the whole city — we let a city check its heart rate and stress levels so it can actually help the people inside it get healthy.
We combine three layers of data to build a complete picture: IoT sensors measuring air quality, noise, and light in real-time. Open datasets like LandScan population grids, Overture Maps (64M+ points of interest), and OpenStreetMap infrastructure. And eventually, anonymous surveys capturing how people actually feel.
Four planetary indices
Raw scientific data converted into a single H3 hexagonal grid anyone can query with one SQL statement.
Elevation, slope, aspect, ruggedness
Density, height, footprint, volume
2025-2100 growth, 16 timesteps
Temperature, wind, pressure, precipitation
All indices share the same H3 cell ID — join terrain, buildings, population, and weather in a single SQL statement. Stored in open table formats, sorted by h3_index for optimized range queries.
The pipeline
From raw scientific data to your browser — no servers in between.
Open by design
We believe urban data should be public infrastructure, just like roads and bridges. Everything we build is open source. Every dataset is published on Source Cooperative in open table formats. All code is on GitHub. Every pipeline, model, and methodology can be verified and audited by anyone.
A community in Dhaka has the same tools as Dubai. No paywalls, no gatekeepers, no privileged access. Closed data creates closed cities — we're building the opposite.
Why we rebuilt the stack
Existing tools weren't designed for open, collaborative urban data. Every organization rebuilds the same pipelines for the same public datasets. Proprietary formats trap data in silos. Raw data needs ETL before any insights. Always-on servers waste energy for intermittent data.
Who this is for
Families looking for healthy neighborhoods. Urban planners who need evidence to justify parks and bike lanes. Researchers who need open datasets. Policymakers writing health regulations. Communities advocating for change. Investors seeking ESG data. Anyone who deserves to know what their environment is doing to them.
Our mission
To reveal the hidden patterns shaping daily life and turn them into people-first solutions that support wellbeing in cities everywhere. Help urban communities become more resilient, sustainable, and genuinely happier.
Using data to support lives, not the other way around.
See it in action
16 data layers, real-time weather, and ~300 GB of open data — all running in your browser. No account needed.
Browse datasets