Seeking neighborhood boundaries globally?

Question

Besides Zillow's creative-commons licensed neighborhood boundaries shapefiles, what sources of neighborhood boundaries are there? Not just in the US, but all over the world.

Free/open source is ideal, but paid sources could be interesting too.

I think this question might be more on-topic at the [opendata.se] Stack Exchange. — PolyGeo, Oct 14 '16 at 02:22
FWIW, Zillow no longer provides their boundaries, and, at least after checking my home state, Illinois, in someone's cached version, they weren't very good anyway. For all of Illinois, all they have are Chicago's "Community Areas," which are understood to mostly be large enough each to comprise several neighborhoods. That said, here's where I found Zillow boundaries today https://mapcruzin.com/free-download-neighborhood-boundary-shapefiles.htm — Joe Germuska, Sep 09 '20 at 18:59

score 7 · Answer 1 · answered May 21 '12 at 07:44

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I don't know what the state of mapping with this is, but OpenStreetMap has a place:neighbourhood tag (note the British spelling).

As the boundaries of neighborhoods are often nebulously defined I think no matter the source you will have to understand that using them for anything more than general display/labeling is going to be tricky.

answered May 21 '12 at 07:44

blah238

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Thanks for the answer! I am completely new to OpenStreetMap, so I don't get what I am supposed to do with the tag place:neighbourhood. Can you provide a few more steps how to use this tag to download the boundaries of neighbourhoods in a city? tnx – NeStack May 08 '22 at 12:27
I looked at that link and I don't get what I am supposed to do with the tag place:neighbourhood tag either. – Adam Apr 10 '23 at 18:05

score 6 · Answer 2 · answered May 21 '12 at 06:12

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Check out commercial data provider http://www.maponics.com for neighbourhood boundary data.

answered May 21 '12 at 06:12

Edward Mac Gillavry

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Maponics has great data, but are pretty pricey. – Avishai Jan 13 '14 at 15:13
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There is a longer Maponics answer below so this one can probably be deleted. – PolyGeo Oct 14 '16 at 02:29

score 5 · Answer 3 · answered May 21 '12 at 07:55

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How about the Flickr Shapefiles which are constructed from the location tags people give geolocated pictures on the site.

answered May 21 '12 at 07:55

Ian Turton

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+1. here is another good article about the processing they did for this dataset: The Shape of Alpha – RyanKDalton May 21 '12 at 15:09
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I see this dataset is upto neighborhood!.Though not accurate as their documentation says Each one of those illustrations represents the boundaries of a particular place whose outline was generated using nothing but the latitudes and longitudes of the geotagged photos associated with that location’s WOE ID this can give a headstart. – Learner Dec 10 '16 at 07:19

RyanKDalton · Accepted Answer · 2012-05-21T18:22:28.583

SimpleGeo (before being acquired by Urban Airship) used to have a worldwide neighborhood boundaries layer. If you do some digging you may be able to troll up an old shapefile, or maybe a kind sole out there already has a copy that they would be willing to let you download.

Alternatively, WeoGeo still appears to have the SimpleGeo neighborhoods available. (Link1, Link2). (Disclaimer: I haven't tried this myself)

Lastly, I recently read an article about the Livehoods project - "Neighborhood Boundaries Generated using foursquare Social Media Data" that might prove to be a useful concept. It is...

the research effort by some keen Carnegie Mellon U mobile lab students (http://mcom.cs.cmu.edu/) analyzed 18 million Foursquare check-ins to spot algorithmic relationships between the spots people frequent. According to the work… “Livehoods looks at the geographic distance between venues, but also a form of `social distance’ that measures the degree of overlap in the people that check-in to them”.

January 12th, 2012: After SimpleGeo was acquired by Urban Airship in Oct 2011, Urban Aiship said “wind down the availability of the current versions of [SimpleGeo's] Places, Context, and Storage over the next few months.”...The target date for pulling the plug officially will be March 31, 2012. Link — RyanKDalton, Feb 07 '13 at 18:38

score 2 · Answer 5 · edited Oct 14 '16 at 02:28

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Maponics can supply you with neighborhood boundaries . If nationwide drops of shape files are too large or beyond your budget, you can also use our API that enables you to download just what you need by attribute, geographic window or ID.

In addition, we also have "Context" data that is associated with our neighborhoods, carrier routes and other boundaries that can tell you all sorts of things about these polygons including things like Clarion Prizm demographic data!

Disclaimer: I work for Maponics

edited Oct 14 '16 at 02:28

PolyGeo

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answered Mar 17 '15 at 14:25

Peter Moeykens

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The community tends to vote down overt self-promotion and flag it as spam. Post good, relevant answers, and if some (but not all) happen to be about your product or website, that’s okay. However, you must disclose your affiliation in your answers. – PolyGeo Oct 14 '16 at 02:27

LeasMaps · Answer 6 · 2017-08-09T09:57:24.323

For Australia I would be looking for 'Locality' Boundaries - these are 'suburbs' and are usually legally defined. The term 'Neighbourhood' is used in Australia but there are not usually legally defined boundary areas for 'Neighbourhood' whereas 'Localities' are legally defined and mapped by the Land Authorities in each state. Try: http://data.gov.au/dataset/bdcf5b09-89bc-47ec-9281-6b8e9ee147aa/resource/d2c450e6-5ad3-45fc-a1da-b82cd30f2c47/download/suburbs---localities-may-2017.zip

score 0 · Answer 7 · answered Feb 19 '16 at 20:28

Many world cities publish data that belong to the public on open data pages. These usually include only official boundaries for city planning, budgets, and the like. Peter-Moeykens is correct that Maponics has much more detailed neighborhood polygons with names that change from year to year. The best data is proprietary, but public data can be quite useful.

For cities outside the English speaking world, you might need to search with the right translation for "neighborhood." For example, the Mayor's Office of the City of Paris has ParisData. By searching for "quartier" (neighborhood) you'll quickly find the official boundary data available in several formats. Take a look at the "carte" tab to preview the geometry. http://opendata.paris.fr/explore/dataset/quartier_paris/map/?location=12,48.85889,2.34692

The text description doesn't machine translate very well: Données géographiques surfaciques. Le quartier désigne la division administrative de l’arrondissement. Chaque arrondissement est découpé en quatre quartiers administratifs. Paris compte ainsi quatre-vingt quartiers administratifs.

Geospatial data. 'Quartier' (neighborhood) refers to the administrative division within the 'arrondissement' (city district). Each 'arrondissement' (district) is divided into four smaller administrative districts. Paris thus totals 80 administrative 'quartiers'.

See here for images that explain the 20 arrondissements and 80 smaller divisions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarters_of_Paris#Chart_of_the_eighty_quartiers_of_Paris

Seeking neighborhood boundaries globally?

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