Room: Talks IV/Workshops II/BoF III - Amphi Picard or Navier (Carnot)
Saturday, 10:05
Duration: 20 minutes (plus Q&A)
Language: en
OSM for Cities is a web platform that makes OpenStreetMap usable for anyone exploring a city’s data. Search any city, browse 200+ dataset categories, and download GeoJSON filtered by administrative boundaries. No GIS expertise required.
When a planning team worked on a bus network reevaluation in Mexico City in the late 2000s, teams GPS-tagged informal bus stops and routes, data dying in proprietary reports. At that time, OpenStreetMap was just emerging and didn’t have the coverage yet. But it offered the perfect infrastructure to make this data reusable and useful for local communities, if only teams had known about it.
Today, OSM has grown, but accessing it for city-level planning remains challenging. Tools exist, but extracting city datasets filtered by administrative boundaries is still difficult for non-technical teams. OSM for Cities closes that gap, with categories spanning schools, healthcare, cycling infrastructure, and transit, backed by a self-hosted Overpass instance for global coverage.
This open-source project invites planners, researchers, local mappers and city officials to use the platform and share feedback. What would you do with easy access to your city’s OSM data? We want to hear the use cases we haven’t thought of yet, and the gaps we should be filling.