South African Settlements and Residential Areas from OpenStreetMap

South Africa's populated places and residential land use, exported from OpenStreetMap. The dataset includes features tagged as cities, towns, villages, hamlets, isolated dwellings, or residential land use, with attributes such as name, population, and multilingual name variants. It was last updated on 2026-03-03 by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team.

Use Cases

• Mapping settlement hierarchies based on the 'place' attribute (city, town, village, etc.)
• Analyzing residential land use distribution based on the 'landuse' attribute
• Linking place names to administrative regions using the 'is_in' attribute
• Studying multilingual place naming conventions based on the 'name:af', 'name:zu', etc. attributes

Strengths

• Includes multilingual place names in languages such as Afrikaans, Zulu, and Xhosa
• Covers multiple settlement types from cities to isolated dwellings
• Available in multiple geospatial formats including GeoPackage, GeoJSON, and SHP

Limitations

• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download
• Freshness should be verified as the last update date is in the future (2026-03-03)

Provenance

Source

Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT)

Collection Method

Export of OpenStreetMap features matching specific tags

Time Range

null

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-03 10:44:09.775534

Geography

South Africa