Urban Pulse is a framework that uses computational topology techniques to capture the pulse of cities. This is accomplished by first modeling the urban data as a collection of time-varying scalar functions over different temporal resolutions, where the scalar function represents the distribution of the corresponding acitivy over the city. The topology of this collection is then used to identify the locations of prominent pulses in a city. The framework includes a visual interface that can be used to explore pulses within and across multiple cities.