City and built form
Urban morphology: building density and typology, block sizes, street width, skyline, network connectivity and land-use mix. Most of it is computed from building and road geometry; where OSM carries no height, storey count or width, the value is an estimate — and the tool card says so.
Tools in this group: 15
Service accessibility
accessibility
Computes, over a grid of sample points, the average distance to the nearest feature of a given type — how close the service is on average across the area.
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Building density
building_density
Counts the number of buildings per hectare and the share of the area's surface occupied by buildings.
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No extra parameters — the bounding box is enough for this tool.
Catchment area
catchment
Builds a zone within a distance_m radius around the features of a layer and computes what share of the bounding box area falls inside it.
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Green coverage
green_coverage
Computes the percentage of the area under greenery: parks, forests, gardens and other green OSM polygons.
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No extra parameters — the bounding box is enough for this tool.
Land use mix
land_use_mix
A Shannon diversity index over land use types: whether one function dominates or the territory is mixed.
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No extra parameters — the bounding box is enough for this tool.
Street connectivity
street_connectivity
The density of intersections and the connectivity of the street network: the higher it is, the smaller the blocks and the shorter the detours.
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No extra parameters — the bounding box is enough for this tool.
Block size
block-size
Estimates the characteristic size of urban blocks from the density of the road network — the blocks themselves are not built as polygons.
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No extra parameters — the bounding box is enough for this tool.
Building footprints
building-footprint
The distribution of building areas, the built-up ratio and an estimate of FAR (floor area ratio) from the number of storeys.
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No extra parameters — the bounding box is enough for this tool.
Parcel analysis
parcel-analysis
The distribution of land parcel areas and their classification by land use type.
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No extra parameters — the bounding box is enough for this tool.
Skyline profile
skyline
An estimate of the skyline of the built-up fabric: the distribution of heights and the maxima per grid cell. Heights are taken from the height and building:levels tags — where they are missing, the building does not enter the profile.
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No extra parameters — the bounding box is enough for this tool.
Street width
street-width
An estimate of street width from the width tag and the number of lanes: where the width is not filled in OSM, it is derived from the lane count.
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No extra parameters — the bounding box is enough for this tool.
Urban form
urban-form
A composite summary: the density of buildings and roads, the green share and the compactness of the built-up fabric — an overview characteristic of the urban tissue.
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No extra parameters — the bounding box is enough for this tool.
Building typology
building-typology
Classifies buildings by type (residential, retail, industrial and others) and shows the distribution of heights.
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No extra parameters — the bounding box is enough for this tool.
Land use classification
land-use-classification
Breaks down the land use types inside the bounding box and computes the area share of each type.
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No extra parameters — the bounding box is enough for this tool.
POI diversity
poi-diversity
Computes a Shannon index over POI categories: how diverse the set of services in the area is.
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No extra parameters — the bounding box is enough for this tool.
Input, output and limits
The input is a rectangular bounding box in WGS84 plus one of nine data layers; some tools also take a point. The output is GeoJSON, JSON metrics or a GeoTIFF.
| Layer | What it holds |
|---|---|
| buildings | buildings |
| roads | roads and streets |
| poi | points of interest: services, shops, tourism |
| water | water bodies |
| green_areas | green areas: parks, forests, lawns |
| railways | railways |
| boundaries | administrative boundaries |
| landuse | land use |
| waterways | waterways |
Every tool in the section is free. The bounding box may cover up to 100 km². Rate limits are 10 requests per minute per tool run and 30 requests per minute for reading the catalogue. Without signing in you get up to 10 successful calculations a day; after that the service asks you to register and answers 402 with the code login_required. A box larger than the allowed area is also 402, and an unknown tool id is 404.