Colouring London

How many buildings are there in London? What are their characteristics? Where are they located and how do they contribute to the city? How adaptable are they? How long will they last, and what are the environmental and socio-economic implications of demolition?

Colouring London is a web-based citizen social science project designed to help address these questions by crowdsourcing and visualising twelve categories of information on London’s buildings.

Structure

This repository will contain open-source code for the project which:

• stores building footprint polygons and source metadata
• allows site users to record building attribute data
• serves map tiles rendered from collected data
• allows site visitors to download the collected building attribute data

Building attribute data collected as part of the project will be made available for download under a liberal open data license (ODbL).

Setup and run

1. Provision database (see migrations)
2. Fill out details in config.json (see config.template.json)
3. Load buildings and geometries to database (see etl)
4. Install app dependencies: cd app && npm i
5. Run tests: npm test
6. Run app: npm start

Acknowledgements

Colouring London is being designed and built by the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), University College London and funded by Historic England. Ordnance Survey is providing building footprints required to collect the data, facilitated by the Greater London Authority (GLA), and giving access to its API and technical support.