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. Load buildings and geometries to database (see etl)
3. Install app dependencies: cd app && npm i
4. Run tests: npm test
5. Run app: npm start

In development, run with environment variables:

APP_COOKIE_SECRET=test_secret \
PGHOST=localhost \
PGUSER=dbuser \
PGDATABASE=dbname \
PGPASSWORD=dbpassword \
PGPORT=5432 \
TILECACHE_PATH=/path/to/tilecache/directory \
    npm start

Acknowledgements

Colouring London was set up at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), University College London and is now based at The Alan Turing Institute. 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.

License

Colouring London
Copyright (C) 2018-2022 Tom Russell and Colouring London contributors

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

Contributors

Thanks goes to these wonderful people (emoji key):

polly64 🎨 🤔 🖋 🔍	Tom Russell 🎨 🤔 💻 📖	mz8i 💻 🤔	dominic 🤔 🖋	Adam Dennett 🤔	Duncan Smith 🤔	martin-dj 💻
MeldaS 💻 🤔	Tarn Hamilton 🎨	Louis Jobst 🎨

This project follows the all-contributors specification. Contributions of any kind welcome!

Even more thanks go to Colouring London contributors, funders, project partners, consultees, advisers, supporters and friends - everyone involved in the project.