CityReads│Dollar Street shows how people live by photos

Gapminder 城读 2020-09-12

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Dollar Street shows how people live by photos

Imagine the world as a street. All houses are lined up by income, the poor living to the left and the rich to the right. Everybody else somewhere in between. Where would you live?

Sources: https://www.ted.com/talks/anna_rosling_ronnlund_see_how_the_rest_of_the_world_lives_organized_by_income/transcript?ref=hvper.com

https://www.gapminder.org/videos/everyone-lives-on-dollar-street/

www.dollarstreet.org

It has been a year since Swedish professor Hans Rosling died（To learn more about him, please read CityReads|Remembering Edutainer Hans Rosling,Who Made Data Dance ）. But his legacy lives on. His book, Factfulness, coauthored with his son, Ola Rosling, and daughter-in-law, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, will be published this April. Together they founded the GapMinder foundation, which continues to carry on the cause that Hans Rosling started. That is, to educate the public about the global facts and help people to establish a fact-based worldview.

Here I want to introduce one recent project of GapMinder Foundation, Dollar Street. This project adheres to the goals of Hans Rosling: to use data and facts to understand the world; and to use visualization to help ordinary people better understand the world.

What is Dollar Street?

The concept Dollar Street was invented by Anna Rosling Rönnlund at Gapminder. Anna holds a Bachelor Degree in Photography and a Master’s Degree in Social Sciences with a major in Sociology. Currently Anna works as the Head of Design & User Experience. Her personal mission is to make it easy for anyone to understand the world visually. Passionate about the visual side of data, she invented the photo-based project Dollar Street, on which she has made two popular TEDx talks.

Imagine the world as a street. All houses are lined up by income, the poor living to the left and the rich to the right. Everybody else somewhere in between. Where would you live?

Dollar Street is a website where Anna and her team have collected imagery from homes from all over the World. A team of photographers have documented over 264 homes in 50 countries so far, and the list is growing. In each home the photographer spends a day taking photos of up to 135 objects, like the family’s toothbrushes or favorite pair of shoes. In total there are 30 000 photos and 10 000 videos from these homes. All photos are then tagged (household function, family name and income).

Photo-based Dollar Street is to make everyone understand how people really live. Beyond the stereotypes and clichés. In a way, it's statistics that you can see, without having to learn how to read them. It's photos as data. Dollar Street use photos as data to understand how people live.

The distribution of 264 families

Dollar Street has been funded mainly by a grant the Swedish Postcode Foundation. The ultimate goal is to make Dollar Street a collaborative platform, in which anyone will be able to upload photos of homes and make them comparable to others around the world. Users are free to reuse, edit and share the images (Creative Commons 4.0 License).

How to use Dollar Street?

Everyone lives on Dollar Street Your house number shows your income per month. Most people live somewhere between the richest and the poorest. We sorted the homes by income, from left to right.

The things we all have in common: Everyone needs to eat, sleep and pee. We all have the same needs, but we can afford different solutions. Select from 100 topics ranging from agriculture lands, alcohol drinks, arm chairs, backyards, bedrooms, bowls, cleaning equipment, cups, doors, everyday shoes, glasses, grains, toilet, toys, washing machine, etc.

Different front doors of families from low-income to high-income

Different beds of families from low-income to high-income

Different toilets of families from low-income to high-income

You can select countries and regions to compare homes from the same part of the world.

Families living in China

A Tibetan family living in Yunnan Province, China

In the same country, people can have very different incomes. To compare homes on similar incomes move these sliders to focus on a certain part of the street.

Three Chinese families from low-, middle-, and high-income

Three Chinese families from low-, middle-, and high-income: their dwellings

Three Chinese families from low-, middle-, and high-income: their stoves

The everyday life looks surprisingly similar for people on the same income level across cultures and continents.

Two high-income families from China and US

Two high-income families from China and US: their beds

Two high-income families from China and US: kids’ playground

Low-income families across continents and countries also live alike.

Two low-income families from Nigeria and China

Two low-income families from Nigeria and China: their rice containers

Two low-income families from Nigeria and China: their stoves

But money is not everything! Click the photos to learn more about the families and their dreams.