9,866,539 buildings in the Netherlands, shaded according to year of construction | Hacker News Reader

9,866,539 buildings in the Netherlands, shaded according to year of construction

dev.citysdk.waag.org

429 pointspjvds73 comments

Check out all the colours in Rotterdam: http://dev.citysdk.waag.org/buildings/#51.9159,4.4974,14

Kind of gives you an idea of how large parts of it were destroyed during the second World War and then has had multiple levels of reconstruction and changes taking place throughout the decades since.

It suffers from a Y2K bug: My house in Amsterdam (and a lot of others) are noted as constructed in: 1005 instead of 1905

And my colleague's house is from 1605 rather than 1005. It's not quite Y2K, but it's interesting that the last two digits seem to have survived whatever error occured.

http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_...? ?

Maybe some other bugs too... There's a capital L shaped area that is marked as all 1995-2005 but when I click on it, it alternates between:

- 1738 - Vijfharingenstraat 5 6211EC Maastricht

- 2002 - Grote Staat 5 6211CT Maastricht

http://dev.citysdk.waag.org/buildings/?utm_source=buffer&utm...

Starting position is Maastricht? You sneaky bastard ;-)

(For non-Dutch people: Maastricht is one of the oldest continuously urban centers in the Netherlands, which makes it nice to show off this kind of technology but it's also very far away from the rest of the country. Nice city though, definitely worth a visit).

Very far for Dutch standards of course. Maastricht is only 2-2.5 hours away from cities like Utrecht, Amsterdam and Rotterdam. For other countries this would be considered close neighbors.

I don't think he/she was going for that effect. The Amsterdam canals are all nice and red in this image. And not just the district famous for that color.

Nederlanders: When was the BAG established, and how was the dataset created? That must have been an incredible collection/standardization/digitization project.

The BAG itself is something a government organisation called the 'Kadaster' maintains. I would be surprised if the US doesn't have a similar organisation.

Basically whenever a house is sold, (I never actually bought a house so someone more knowledgeable should correct me) information about the purchase and the state of the house is submitted to the Kadaster. As far as I know the kadaster is something that has its roots in the middle ages, but I could be mistaken.

As for the digitization, that probably happened somewhere in the late 60's early 70's out of necessity along with many other governmental databases (like taxes).

What is news is that one apparently can query the entire kadaster database, this is something done by http://dev.citysdk.waag.org/, a European project so maybe we'll get info like this from other countries as well.

The BAG itself is something a government organisation called the 'Kadaster' maintains. I would be surprised if the US doesn't have a similar organisation.

I know some municipalities maintain extensive GIS and financial datasets that include valuation, sale data, ownership, maps, etc. Here's an example from the Boston assessor's database: http://www.cityofboston.gov/assessing/search/?pid=0503500000

But I don't know if smaller/poorer towns have created or maintain digital archives, what standards are used, or whether data is shared at the county or state level. One question I have: Is this a state or local requirement that such records are created and posted online, and how does it differ from municipality to municipality and state to state?

I would be surprised if a federal agency maintained a national database like the Netherlands, although these days it's not really clear what data our government is gathering/sharing, and for what sorts of purposes.

It sounds as if the UK equivalent would be the Land Registry http://www.landregistry.gov.uk/media/all-releases/press-rele...

It's not the whole UK - just England & Wales. ROS do the same job in Scotland (http://www.ros.gov.uk/); not sure about NI.

The land registry is woefully incomplete. Things only get into the registry when there's a change of ownership, and some land has been in the same family since the Domesday book. This was a problem when I used to work on software processing planning applications as some councils thought they could use the land registry to validate addresses.

The planning applications had great data in them if it could be opened up (eg they are generally submitted with a property boundary map!) but generally the councils wanted to either monetize this data or not release it at all; so you just get pdfs&metadata out, even when the user submitted in a vector format.

Thank you, fascinating.

1. It's not only houses or buildings; land also is administered. Also, in apartment buildings, each apartment has a separate registration code.

2. 'Kadaster' is dutch for the English 'cadastre' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadastre)

3. The Dutch cadastre was initiated in 1811, by decree from Napoleon Bonaparte (the Netherlands was part France at the time). First ?complete? set was available in 1832 (http://www.kadaster.nl/web/Themas/themaartikel/dossierartike...; in Dutch)

Ahh, if only we had a 'national cadastral database'...

No, instead we have a very limited series of copyright-protected maps by a company called Sanborn that was hired to do this style map from 1867 to 2007 for fire insurance companies - but not in every town and city, not regularly, and rarely for rural areas.

On top of that we have 3100 county-like bodies which will each tend to have a local plat map of who owns which properties (which will occasionally mark buildings), in varying stages of digitization and privatization (some of them charge ridiculous amounts, some are public access).

We also have an irregularly updated USGS quad dataset that is not very precise, and doesn't attempt either building shape or urban areas.

Lastly, there are modern aerial-collection LIDAR returns that tend to produce high accuracy building corner references.

The "Law for Registration of Addresses and Buildings" ("wet basisregistraties adressen en gebouwen") was accepted by the Senate ("Eerste Kamer") on 22 January 2008, and went into effect on 1 July 2009. The dataset was created by forcing municipalities to put all of their their data on addresses and buildings into one central database, the BAG ("Basisregistraties Adressen en Gebouwen").

Source: Dutch Wikipedia http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basisregistraties_Adressen_en_G...

Many Americans claim that American cities are difficult to walk or bicycle in because they are all so much newer than European cities. But maps like these demonstrate that a huge proportion of European cities were built in the automobile era, including a great deal post-WWII; the difference in walkabality, mass transit, and bikeability of European cities is not the age of the city center but simply the decisions of what modes of transportation to prioritize in new developments.

I just have to say "Dank u" for choosing a colour scheme that is friendly to those with Colour Vision Deficiency of the red/green variety. A huge number of maps which use gradations of colour to represent data are useless to up to 1 in 10 men because they adopt the rainbow colour scheme with red and green representing opposite ends of the spectrum.

Cartographers have it easy thanks to the wonderful sets on http://colorbrewer2.org/js/ . The scheme looks inspired by them.

I wonder why this map was done with a divergent scheme though. The data has no midpoint, it makes no sense to diverge like that. And when you zoom out it, due to the diverging lightness ramp it highlights the lightest colors which are 1945 to 1975.

It looks gorgeous but the color choice is not perfect for exploring the data.

You're right to point that out. I agree that a divergent scheme is not the best fit for the data. A simple gradient would have worked best, though it would have been less colourful.

I would use differently colored sequential schemes per building type, that might look good. Time to grab the data and play around. :)

Awesome! You can read something from every zoom level. I couldn't find my house though, it seemed to be swallowed by my neighbours, but that may be the result of the max zoomlevel. Any reason that one can not zoom in further?

These systems generally use prerendered PNG tiles at several zoom levels - it's not vector based.

When you click on a house, the click is converted to lat/lon and compared with the database to show which house you clicked.

This is really cool, but why don't the color gradations go back further? Is it a matter of how records were kept? I would have loved to see how many buildings survive from each century from, say, 700AD on. Pre-1850 as a category seems like such a waste for a map of the old world.

Quoting Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam:

> Originating as a small fishing village in the late 12th century, Amsterdam became one of the most important ports in the world during the Dutch Golden Age, a result of its innovative developments in trade.

So I doubt there are a lot of buildings from 700AD left. But I agree, they could've gone back to ~1500AD.

Funny thing is: the non-profit that created this map is De Waag Society, located in De Waag in Amsterdam - a building dating from the 1400s.

The funny thing about the Netherlands, (or at least 90% of it) is that there is no natural stone to build with. No rocks, no pebbles, no stones, nothing. Just sand, clay and peat. In most places, the bedrock is hundreds of feet below the surface. Constructions were made of wood and mud, because everything else had to be imported.

Despite popular perception, there's more to Netherland than just Amsterdam. Some towns are quite a bit older. Some date back to Roman settlements.

Still, building materials mean that buildings from before the 16th century are incredibly rare.

Also, record keeping from that era isn't perfect - Reddit found that many old churches from ~ 1300 are labeled as 1600 or 1950, that being the date of the last extension or modification.

Check out an interactive variant at http://bag.edugis.nl/. Beware of errors in the data, though.

Alternatively, download the data from https://data.overheid.nl/data/dataset/basisregistratie-adres...; it is open data.

That is very easy to answer: Other than churches and castles, pretty much all buildings up to the 17th century were made of wood, and did not survive. Only a few buildings predate 1800.

In Amsterdam, most pre-17th century buildings were wooden, and didn't survive the fires. A cafe on Zeedijk (http://www.mokums.nl/aepjen.html) is one of the oldest buildings, dating from 1544. You know that it's really old because it's wooden (wood got banned as construction material after one of the fires).

Wow. Even the garage of my parent's house is on it, which isn't finished yet!

Sounds logical; you have to request a building permit for it, along with the plans for the garage, which is sent to Kadaster for kicks.

Wow, Brielle is bananas.

http://dev.citysdk.waag.org/buildings/#51.899,4.1585,15

https://maps.google.com/maps?q=brielle+netherlands&hl=en&ll=...

I was wondering about those giant, closely spaced industrial-looking buildings on the outskirts of town. Apparently greenhouses: http://goo.gl/maps/qIQxk

Yes, those are greenhouses. Move north-east for a bit, and you hit the Westland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westland_(region),_Netherlands), an area of greenhouses with the occasional road or house in-between.

At night, from the ground: http://straatkaart.nl/2286JK-Albert-Schweitzerlaan/media_fot...

At night, from space: http://www.flickr.com/photos/astro_andre/6769497883/in/set-7... (the large bright spot are greenhouses with artificial lighting to speed up plant growth)

This is initially stunning yet rich, data-dense, detailed and simple. I would refer to this when travelling in the Netherlands and especially for looking at apartments and real estate.

Maybe for tourist travel it's a cool way to spot old historic buildings you'd otherwise not find, but for real estate? I would expect that whatever real estate catalogue you browse will also list the build year. As another commenter said, that data is in public databases (called the "kadaster"), I would assume every real estate agent is aware and uses the kadaster-data :)

Which doesn't detract from the fact that this is a beautiful visualisation. And also I doubt the general public can query those data in the bulk amounts required for this map :)

The catalogue will list the build-year of the property you're looking at, but will it give much information on the build-years of the other nearby buildings?

I think are way too many errors in the data set for that. For example, you might end up at Hoog Catahrijne shopping mall, listed as being from 1893, built in 1976, and in the process of a huge overhaul.

True, the big academic hospital here is coloured as really old, but the shape of the building is definitely mostly modern additions, parts of which I've seen being built while I lived here :)

But to properly display that is a real hard problem. First, you need way more data, a complete history of the changing shapes of buildings as they were being reconstructed/renewed/etc, over the ages. Second, how to visualize all of that? Layer all of it on top of eachother, with old at the bottom and newer shapes covering it, maybe? or ... stacked in 3D, like a geo/archeological excavation!

Right now it seems a bit of a compromise, mashing up two datasets that don't always properly "fit" together. But on the whole, on average, and for many aesthetic purposes, it does a very good job.

I'm one of the designers at funda (largest Dutch real estate listing site) -- though on the Personalisation team and not the Search or Presentation teams.

This is definitely a beautiful and useful visualisation and something we've been thinking about for a while too. We've found that in an average real estate search people very much appreciate information about the neighbourhoods they come across when finding relevant properties. The thing I love about this is -- like some others pointed out already about Rotterdam -- is that it tells a genuine story about a neighbourhoods history in a way a real estate agent wouldn't be able too.

In the US there's Trulia Hindsight built by Stamen Design which includes animation: http://hindsight.trulia.com

Interesting, I stand corrected, yeah I could see it work in that context.

This is incredibly cool; looks like my house and office were built in 1978 and 1850 respectively!

Awesome. Here's a building that was built in 1300 https://www.google.com/maps/preview?authuser=0#!q=Keizer+Kar...

Our house was built in 1976. It took a while to find it though, could use some overlay options or a search bar. Really interesting and cool though! :)

You can see the oldest inner cities and each 'ring' of newer buildings around it. Example: Amsterdam: http://dev.citysdk.waag.org/buildings/?utm_source=buffer&utm... Very cool.

I see a lot of buildings in the old inner city were built in the year 1005 CE. Is there any historical significance to that year? http://dev.citysdk.waag.org/buildings/?utm_source=buffer&utm...

I suspect it is because they don't actually know the date of those houses, but just know that they are old. 1005 is strange for Amsterdam, as Amsterdam first really became a city in the 1300s. Still, maybe it is just the tool's 'first date' or something.

Yeah, none of those are probably accurate. My colleague owns a house in the area you linked to that was built in or around 1605, but it's listed as 1005 as well.

Fortunately, the site links to this page where you can report incorrect data: http://www.kadaster.nl/web/Themas/themaartikel/BAGartikel/BA...

9M reads like a brand, I think the title should read "9 M".

A successor to 3M? I suppose there's always the old "MM" notation, or it could be written "9m".

"9 million" would work, too.

I like the detailed number it now has

If anyone is interested, I did this for Portland, Oregon back in June.

http://labratrevenge.com/pdx

http://dealloc.me/2013/06/30/the-making-of-pdx.html

Really cool, but every single move I made on my ipad added a new history. And trying to go back after spending 10 minutes playing around was the most annoying thing I've ever experienced. So annoying I had to close my browser and reopen HN.

Pretty much all my suburb of Groningen was built in the late 70s and early 80s. It is cool that many people live in cooler districts, but the Netherlands has a long history of <i>nieuwbouw</i>.

This is really cool. I'd love to see something like this done for other parts of the world as well. I just wish it wouldn't push to history every time you drag around.

The reason this exists is that the Dutch Government is forcing municipalities to put every address/building into a central database, the "Basisregistratie Adressen en Gebouwen"(BAG, "Registration of addresses and building")

It has uncovered some interesting issues with addresses - some student housing for instance has complicated numbering schemes that don't fit in the database (i.e 10 B 5). Municipalities that don't cooperate are cut national contributions.

My favorite part is here: http://dev.citysdk.waag.org/buildings/#51.9004,4.5486,16

There's a building older than my country sitting right next to one built while I was in college. The casual blend of old and new is one of the things I love about European culture.

I'm sure it's found in many other places on our humble planet, but I've only been to Europe (so far!).

I love finding things on HN that my mom can also appreciate. :)

Wow.

>Building

>Constructed: 1300

>Address: Keizer Karelplein 6 6211TC Maastricht

>Area: 3,306 m²

>Function: Public

Here is the street view:

http://goo.gl/maps/On8Dw

Google Maps Mania posted about a few similar maps last week.

As well as the Netherlands map there is the Portland map, a map of Ljubljana, Slovenia (similar to the Portland map) and the Brooklyn map.

http://www.mapsmaniac.com/2013/08/view-age-of-10-million-glo...

What a terrible use of the browser history. I was trying to get back to HN and had to trace through every movement I took on the map.

The website is really messing up my back button. For example I can't press the back button and return to this page.

An excellent example of the techno-fetishism and efficiency/dataset worship surrounding a modern nanny state. To quote some prominent graffiti I walked past this morning in central Rotterdam, one mere hour ago: "Is this freedom?" Clearly, no. Holland's pretty totalitarian these days.

You could easily make a similar looking map with the NYC Pluto data. http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/bytes/applbyte.shtml

I would really like to see this for a city like NYC or SF.

Here is one for Brooklyn:

http://bklynr.com/block-by-block-brooklyns-past-and-present/

I published some instructions on how to generate such a map using the recently released PLUTO data:

http://bdon.org/2013/06/29/working-with-pluto-and-pad/

To the best of my knowledge, San Francisco doesn't have a public building age dataset. There is a building footprint dataset on https://data.sfgov.org/, but the quality of the shapes isn't very good.

sugoi!

It's beautiful.

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