Vietnam Populated Places and Residential Areas from OpenStreetMap

Geospatial settlement data for Vietnam exported from OpenStreetMap by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) in March 2026. It captures point and polygon features categorized by settlement type, such as cities, towns, and hamlets, alongside residential land use zones.

Use Cases

• Analyzing urban sprawl by filtering for 'landuse' tagged as 'residential'
• Developing localized navigation tools using 'name:vi' for Vietnamese language support
• Estimating settlement density by grouping features by the 'place' attribute (e.g., hamlet vs. town)

Strengths

• Provides multilingual support via 'name:vi' and 'name:en' columns
• Available in four standard GIS formats including SHP and GeoJSON
• Includes specific settlement classifications from 'isolated_dwelling' to 'city'

Limitations

• Subject to OpenStreetMap volunteer mapping bias, potentially favoring urban over rural areas
• Population figures are often missing or inconsistent with official government census data

Provenance

Source

OpenStreetMap via Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT)

Collection Method

Crowdsourced geospatial data export

Freshness

Updated March 2026

Geography

Vietnam