Map of All the Buildings in the World

Summary

The world has a lot of buildings. Now you can see them all with a single glance. A research team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in Germany published the GlobalBuildingAtlas, a high-resolution 3D map of all buildings worldwide. The map consists of 2.75 billion building models, which the team gathered from satellite images taken since 2019. This is a huge leap from the previous global dataset, which contained about 1.7 billion buildings, and offers much better resolution, which is about 30 times finer than comparable databases, according to the researchers in a statement. A detailed account of how the map was created was also published in the journal Earth System Science Data on December 1. You can access the interactive map here. There’s also a tab for entering a specific address, which also tells you the building placement and elevation. Here’s the result for Gizmodo’s office in New York: Credit: GlobalBuildingAtlas/TUM/Screenshot by Gizmodo Alternatively, you can also download the data and code for GlobalBuildingAtlas from GitHub. Why buildings? From satellite data, the team generated 3D models of metrics like a building’s height, volume, and position compared to other buildings in its vicinity. All the data was also treated with a filtering strategy to account for differences in the quality of satellite data for certain regions. Overview of resulting GlobalBuildingAtlas dataset. © Wang et al., 2025 Other than being cool to look at, the researchers created the project to serve a socioeconomic and environmental purpose. For instance, such a comprehensive, bird’s-eye-view map offers detailed information about the “footprint” of urbanization and poverty around the world, Xiaoxiang Zhu, study lead author and a data scientist at TUM, said in the statement. For this purpose, the researchers also took special care in finding and incorporating data from often-omitted regions in global maps, such as Africa, South America, and rural areas. The dataset also inclu...