Earth2Street — From Space to Street

Inspiration

We live in cities every day, but we rarely see the environmental problems happening around us as one connected picture.

In Tân Phú, Ho Chi Minh City, a street can be extremely hot, have little shade, poor pedestrian conditions, heavy traffic, or limited access to public transportation. Satellite data can show us what is happening from above, while people on the street experience what is happening on the ground.

We wanted to connect these two perspectives.

What if NASA could help us understand a neighborhood, while citizens help us understand how it feels to live there?

That question inspired Earth2Street.

What it does

Earth2Street is a web platform that combines NASA Earth observation data, local environmental information, citizen reports, and AI to help people understand urban environmental and mobility problems.

We start with Tân Phú, Ho Chi Minh City as our pilot area.

The platform allows users to explore a map and see different layers such as:

• 🌡️ Urban heat
• 🌳 Green coverage
• 🌧️ Rain and water-related risks
• 🚶 Pedestrian conditions
• 🚌 Public transportation
• 🛵 Mobility
• 📍 Citizen observations

Citizens can also contribute information from the street by reporting problems, adding photos, and describing their experience.

AI then combines these different sources of information to identify potential urban hotspots and explain why they matter.

For example:

“This area has high heat exposure, limited vegetation, and poor pedestrian conditions.”

The platform can then suggest possible interventions such as increasing shade, improving pedestrian routes, connecting public transportation, or adding green infrastructure.

How NASA data is used

NASA provides the view from space.

Earth observation data helps us understand environmental patterns that are difficult to see from street level, such as changes in land surface temperature, vegetation, water, and urban development.

We combine this with information collected closer to the ground.

This creates a simple loop:

SPACE → STREET → AI → ACTION

NASA sees the Earth from above.

Citizens describe what they experience below.

AI connects the two perspectives.

The result is a more human-centered understanding of the city.

Why Tân Phú?

Tân Phú is our starting point because it represents the complexity of a rapidly developing urban neighborhood in Ho Chi Minh City.

Instead of trying to solve every problem in the entire city, we focus on one area and demonstrate how Earth observation and citizen-generated information can be turned into actionable local insights.

The long-term vision is to expand the approach from Tân Phú to other neighborhoods, cities, and eventually other countries.

What makes it different?

Earth2Street is not simply another map.

It is a bridge between satellite data and human experience.

Traditional environmental dashboards tell us what the data says.

Citizen reports tell us what people experience.

Earth2Street combines both and uses AI to turn them into understandable recommendations.

We also designed the platform to be hardware-independent. IoT sensors can be connected in the future, but communities can already contribute observations without requiring specialized hardware.

Future

Our next step is to connect low-cost environmental sensors to the platform so that communities can continuously collect street-level data.

We envision a future where neighborhoods can build their own environmental maps, identify local problems, test possible interventions, and measure whether those interventions actually improve people's lives.

From NASA's view of Earth to the reality of a street in Tân Phú.

That is Earth2Street.

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NASA sees the Earth from space. Citizens experience it from the street. Earth2Street connects the two with AI.

Built With

• react