Regions, data and credits
What each region covers, where its data comes from, and whose imagery this is.
A region is an area the tool has street and block data for. Planning works only inside a region; the region is chosen in the top bar of the tool, on Library and Plan.
Regions
| Region | Covers | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Manhattan | Street planning and labels across Manhattan | Labels cover the whole borough when the build was made with its label data; otherwise only around West 14th Street |
| Greater Boston | The 101 cities and towns of the MAPC region, among them Boston, Cambridge and Somerville | Present only when the build was made with its data. Its source has no building heights, so labels show estimated horizontal bounds |
Each region keeps its own draft plan. A saved path remembers its region, and opening it switches to that region.
New regions are contributed to the project's repository and then appear in the region chooser. A contribution holds prepared street and block data, the attribution of its sources, and validation; building labels can be added separately. The contribution guide has the steps.
Street labels
A path can be saved with building and cross-street labels (Save street labels with path, at the bottom of the path column). They are carried through capture and stitching and can be drawn over the preview and the print with Estimated labels. A building is named by its address on the street being photographed, so a corner building takes the address on your street. They are estimates of where things are; they do not mark exact pixels, and they are never drawn into the images.
Imagery
The 3D imagery is Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles, © Google and its data providers. It is loaded with your own key under Google's terms for the Map Tiles API. Those terms, not this guide, decide what you may do with the images you make.
Data
- Manhattan street centrelines and the block polygons derived from them, building footprints and address points: NYC Open Data (Street Centerline (CSCL), Building Footprints, Address Points), NYC Office of Technology and Innovation. Ground heights use NOAA's GEOID18.
- Greater Boston streets, building roof outlines and municipal boundaries: MassGIS, Bureau of Geographic Information, Commonwealth of Massachusetts EOTSS.
- The 2D map in Plan: CARTO Positron, with data from OpenStreetMap contributors.
Software
React, React Router, Vite, Three.js with 3d-tiles-renderer, deck.gl with MapLibre GL, Tailwind CSS and Base UI. Outlines are computed with GEOS-WASM (license) and route cuts with JSTS (license).
Author
Every Building is by Yufeng Zhao, in the spirit of Ed Ruscha's Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966). The source is at github.com/yz3440/every-building.