Rhythmscape

A Critical Urban Diagnostic Assistant.

"Whose rhythm is the infrastructure built for, and what settlement life gets left in the gaps?"

Built with Claude Code for the Built with Opus 4.7 Hackathon (April 22–27, 2026).

🚧 Status: Hackathon build in progress. Expect rapid changes.

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Transparency Note

This project is built entirely during the hackathon week (2026-04-22 → 2026-04-27 KST). Planning documents (spec, scoping, literature scouting) and the theoretical prompt framework — informed by Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis, Deleuze–Guattari's refrain theory, Foucault's governmentality, and critical-geographic accounts of automobility (Urry, Sheller, Dant) — predate the hackathon as past experience, consistent with the rule clarification provided by Anthropic moderators on 2026-04-22 in the #-office-hours channel of the official Claude Developer Discord (moderated by Ado | Claude):

"The requirement is to build a new project with valid GitHub commits from when the hackathon started to when it ends. That's not to say you can't take inspiration and learnings from prior works into building the hackathon project, but the code for the hackathon needs to be written this week."

All application code in this repository is written during the hackathon week. Verbatim moderator rulings are preserved in docs/evidence/ for audit purposes.

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What it does

A Python package + CLI that ingests a city's transport networks, settlement indicators, and local discourse, then produces a self-contained HTML report identifying friction zones — places where the rhythm of automotive infrastructure collides with the rhythm of settlement life.

• Flagship city: Changwon (Masan-hoewon district) — a 1970s planned industrial city whose grid was laid out on the assumption of universal car ownership.
• Scale-up: Busan/Yeongdo · Jinju · Sacheon (Gyeongsangnam-do).

Core indicators:

• Automotive Rhythm Dominance Index (ARDI) — spatio-temporal car-regime score per grid cell
• Pedestrian Residue Map (PRM) — where walking life survives the automotive capture

Theoretical grounding: Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis, Urry/Sheller/ Dant's automobility theory, Deleuze–Guattari's refrain theory, Foucault's governmentality, Brenner/Harvey on uneven development.

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Installation (coming)

# uv (recommended)
uv sync

# Copy env template and fill in API keys
cp .env.example .env
# ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, KOSIS_API_KEY, SGIS_SERVICE_ID / SGIS_SECRET_KEY,
# TAGO_API_KEY, VWORLD_API_KEY

Usage details will expand as the build proceeds.

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Repository layout (target)

rhythmscape/
├── src/rhythmscape/      # Python package (ingest / harmonize / indicators / interpret / render)
├── cities/               # per-city config (yaml)
├── prompts/              # theoretical prompt library (ko, en)
├── docs/                 # spec, evidence, api references
├── notebooks/            # demo + exploration
└── tests/                # pytest

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License

MIT (see LICENSE). External data sources carry their own licenses — OSM (ODbL), KOSIS/SGIS (Korean public-data standard licence), BIGKinds (KPF terms of use).

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Citation

@software{rhythmscape2026,
  author  = {Gimm, Dong-Wan},
  title   = {Rhythmscape: A Critical Urban Diagnostic Assistant},
  year    = {2026},
  url     = {https://github.com/thelevanter/rhythmscape}
}

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Author

Dong-Wan Gimm (@thelevanter) Department of Sociology, Kyungnam University Critical Geography · Urban Studies