A Coruña already produces a remarkable amount of data about itself. The bus company knows where every vehicle is. The census records how every neighbourhood is changing. The Concello maintains the boundaries of every school zone, every district, every planning decision. This information exists, it is largely public, and it is mostly invisible to the people it describes.
Coruña Labs is a small attempt to close that gap. The idea is borrowed openly from places like New York’s Planning Labs: take public data, build a clear and well-made tool on top of it, and give it away. No app to download, no account to create, no paywall. Just a thing that works, in the browser, for anyone in the city.
Built on the city’s own work
The lab does not generate the data. The bus company, the statistical office, and the Concello do that, quietly and continuously, as part of running a city. The lab’s job is narrower: to make that work legible. Every tool published here will name its sources and explain its method, because a civic tool that cannot be checked is not worth much.
That posture is deliberate. The most useful thing a small independent lab can do is not to replace public institutions but to show their work: to take the data they already publish and turn it into something a resident, a journalist, or a planner can actually use.
What comes first
The first tool is a live bus map: every vehicle in the network, moving on the map in real time, the way New York’s subway map shows its trains. After that, an interactive census map and a school-zone finder. Each will arrive when it is genuinely ready, and each will be open-source.
This is the beginning of something meant to grow slowly and well. More soon.