South Africa Building Footprints from OpenStreetMap

An OpenStreetMap export for South Africa containing all features where the 'building' tag is not null. The dataset is provided by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and was last updated on 2026-03-03. Features may include attributes such as building type, levels, materials, and multilingual names.

Use Cases

• Map urban density and settlement patterns based on building locations.
• Analyze building types and materials for infrastructure assessment.
• Geocode addresses using the provided address attributes like street and housenumber.
• Support multilingual applications using the name attributes in languages like Afrikaans, Xhosa, and Zulu.

Strengths

• Includes multilingual name attributes for 9 South African languages, which suggests cultural and linguistic coverage.
• Attributes for building levels and materials allow for structural analysis.
• Data is available in multiple geospatial formats (GEOJSON, SHP, GEOPACKAGE, KML).

Limitations

• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Data may reflect geographic or contributor bias inherent to OpenStreetMap.

Provenance

Source

Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT)

Collection Method

Crowdsourced mapping and export from OpenStreetMap.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-03 09:52:57.045089; freshness should be verified.

Geography

South Africa