
A Map of Every Building in America - jf
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/12/us/map-of-every-building-in-the-united-states.html
======
mrguyorama
Oh wow that Microsoft dataset!

I played with a dataset like this from OpenStreetMap, and other Geographic
Information Systems data (did you know the US government makes freely
available 10 meter resolution heightmaps of the entire continental United
States? And in some places better?). It was a lot of fun, and a mild bit
unsettling, looking at this publicly available data, and tracking down
childhood homes in backwoods communities and seeing very accurate footprints
of houses.

The GIS community has built absolute metric craploads of tooling to work with
all this data and play with it. Check out
[https://www.gdal.org/](https://www.gdal.org/) if you are interesting, and
QGIS [[https://qgis.org/en/site/](https://qgis.org/en/site/)] for an open
source data viewer.

I used all this support and data to build a silly script to take in that
heightmap data and turn it into a 3D model that could be imported into Blender
(or other software). I'm currently "stuck" at trying to overlay freely
available road data over that terrain.

~~~
kopo
Interesting. Just wondering whats the size of the entire dataset download?

~~~
walrus01
Not very big at all, I'm mirroring the whole thing, an individual state ranges
from 29MB (Idaho) to about 375MB (California).

------
phaedrus
I recently heard about a short story by a French author about a map making-
obsessed country who covered their whole country with a 1:1 scale map. For
years I've had the idea for an indie game about trying make it from one side
of the USA to the other with a crappy car and little money - basically a
modern-day reimagining of Oregon Trail. However a challenge would be rendering
interesting buildings and cities. So something I thought about is what if the
game also uses the idea of the whole country having a 1:1 street atlas map
draped over everything? You could give hints of there being buildings and
other interesting things peeking through rips in the map, while most of the
modeling / graphics is really just open street map data textured over a height
map.

~~~
2bitencryption
There's a game similar to what you're describing, except in the USSR instead
of the USA:

[https://store.steampowered.com/app/446020/Jalopy/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/446020/Jalopy/)

~~~
colanderman
Wow, that's like My Summer Car [1] but with a goal.

[1] [http://www.amistech.com/msc/](http://www.amistech.com/msc/)

------
petersellers
The image to me looks like mold growth, which made me think about whether or
not there are any parallels between human infrastructure growth and
bacterial/fungal colony growth.

~~~
nkoren
Yes: [https://www.wired.com/2010/01/slime-mold-grows-network-
just-...](https://www.wired.com/2010/01/slime-mold-grows-network-just-like-
tokyo-rail-system/)

------
bennettfeely
Interesting converse idea would be a map of everywhere on earth essentially
untouched by humans. Places with virtually no buildings, farms, roads, human-
made trails, or any other modern human development.

Obviously humanity has left its mark on just about every corner of the world,
but a map of the shrinking relatively untouched areas would be neat.

------
codingdave
I'm always interested in what exists in this kind of dataset. Near me, they
have my neighbor's stables and garage, and the covered picnic tables behind my
church.... but have neither of my barns which have been here since the 70s,
and are about 3 years behind on the homes being built.

------
Ancalagon
This really puts the environmental impact of humanity into perspective for me.
Not including secondary or tertiary effects, look at how much of the world
that humans have physically, immediately touched! And to put this map even
more into perspective, the US isn't even close to being the most densely
populated. Imagine what the the maps of China, India, and the EU look like!

~~~
kijin
Buildings are only a small fraction of humanity's impact on the world.

A lot of land that isn't built up (and therefore doens't show up on the NYT
map) is used for farming. After all, we have seven billion mouths to feed.

Most forests that aren't used for farming have probably been clear-cut a
number of times already, and are still being managed artificially. We need
timber for the buildings.

There are forests in Europe that appear peaceful until you realize that the
reason nobody goes in there is that the ground is chock full of unexploded
shells from two world wars.

And in case you find a desert where nothing useful can grow, you might want to
check if we've detonated a couple of nukes there.

------
bloaf
That's a super cool dataset. It does drive the more philosophical question of
"what constitutes a building" though.

Looking at the map, it seems that large liquid storage tanks count as
buildings, but pipelines do not. Other large industrial facilities (e.g.
distillation towers) seem to be hit-or-miss. Docks and other offshore
platforms seem to be missing although it wouldn't surprise me if there are
intellectual property or security issues around some of these things.

Edit: The statue of liberty counts as a building, but the map seems a little
bit confused about various Washington DC monuments.

Edit2: Amphitheaters seem hit-or-miss. Playground structures and pools seem to
be out.

