The City Tarot · Yunning (Riley) Tang

01.The Problem

Traditional data visualisation fails to capture the emotional and human cost of urban policy. Statistics about “housing starts” or “transit delays” sanitise lived experience, stripping away the narrative of struggle, hope and systemic violence.

Cities are complex systems of visible infrastructure and invisible forces.

Why Tarot? A 78-card deck that emerged in 15th-century Italy as the parlour game tarocchini, Tarot works not as a predictor of a fixed future but as a tool for pattern recognition: a semantic container that lets people externalise internal narratives through universal symbols.

Illustrated The Tower and The Fool cards

The historical deck, and our own illustrated Tower and Fool.

The cards do not only predict the future; they reveal the architecture of the present.

02.Why Tarot for City Narratives

1 · Archetypal recognitionUniversal symbols make abstract urban phenomena emotionally legible. Cities speak in archetypes.

2 · Narrative over numbersCharts flatten complexity. Tarot holds contradictions.

3 · Participatory meaning-makingUsers don’t consume data, they interpret it. Like navigating a city, each reading requires active sense-making, turning residents into storytellers.

4 · Cultural accessibilityTarot invites diverse publics into urban policy conversations that typically gatekeep.

Archetype	Urban critical mapping	Toronto narrative seed
The Tower	Institutions (Big Tech, the Finance District) built on precarious foundations: market bubbles, social alienation, promised utopia.	“A tower built to touch the cloud, yet leaving the residents at its base in the shadow.”
The Lovers	The dynamics of cooperation, conflict and coexistence between different communities.	“On a street that divides an affluent neighbourhood from a low-income one, a constant conversation about land and belonging takes place.”
The Fool	The opportunities, vulnerabilities and explorations faced by immigrants, new graduates and others in an unfamiliar urban landscape.	“A person who arrives in a new city with all their savings; their dreams are both the city’s fuel and its most fragile asset.”

Narrative generation logic

01User inputThe visitor draws a card, which triggers the engine.

02Narrative engineNews data is injected from the news database, e.g. a CBC report on the Eglinton Crosstown delay.

03SynthesisArchetype mapping turns the card and the news into a generated critical narrative explaining the city.

04Ask a critical questionThe narrative ends by handing a question back to the reader.

The Crosstown does not fail loudly. It fails in pauses: a light that never turns green, a platform where bodies wait without knowing for what. Software replaces schedules, and accountability dissolves into vendor updates no commuter can see.Generated narrative, The Tower × Eglinton Crosstown

The TowerFinancial District

Fig. 01Toronto street network43.65° N, 79.38° WToronto as the text to be read.

03.Narrative Pool & Implementation

Each card carries 3–5 pre-researched critical narratives backed by verified Toronto data sources. The system randomly samples one and injects it into GPT-4o prompts, balancing quality control with generative variety.

01User selects “The Tower”A card is drawn or picked.

02System retrieves the narrative poolThe card’s 3–5 curated narratives.

03Random selectionPool 1 is chosen.

04LLM promptThe curated script is sent to the AI.

original cards

urban archetypes

39+

live data sources: CBC, Star, Open Data

Tech stack

Framework: Next.js 14 (App Router)
Styling: Tailwind CSS, cyberpunk gold + black theme
AI: OpenAI API (GPT-4 nano for fable generation)
Type safety: TypeScript throughout
Data flow: Server Components → API Routes → Client Components

Dataset: one card, The Fool

City archetype: The Gig Worker / The Newcomer
Keywords: precarity · new immigration · hustle · hope · instability · toronto city
Urban narrative: “Stepping off the bus with a backpack and a dream, walking into a city that costs too much.” “The freedom of the gig economy is a cliff edge disguised as a bridge.”
Critical analysis: Mechanism: the gig economy. Impact: the commodification of risk; freedom from bosses replaced by servitude to algorithms.
From the archive: Brampton launches and then partially pauses a rental licensing crackdown on illegal student rooming houses after landlord protests.
Reflection prompts: “What is the cost of your freedom?” “Who bears the risk in this new economy?”

The Fool card page with critical theme, archive source and generated fable — A card page: critical theme, source material from the archive and the AI-generated fable.

04.Outcome

The finished site walks from a landing page to Choose your path (the archive or a draw), an archetype gallery, and finally the card: critical theme, source material from the archive, the AI-generated fable and a full report.

The City Tarot landing page: the title set over a gold street-network drawing of Toronto with registration marks and a title block

The archive: a numbered grid of archetype cards over the street network

Choose an archetype to explore: the gallery that leads into each reading.