TL;DR: There are quite a few places on the continent that still need mapping. If you want to know why and how I came to that conclusion, read on ;-)

Preface

Since March 2023 there’s a handy bot called @SmallTownUSA@en.osm.town on the Fediverse, that posts a daily “task” out to its followers, highlighting “small towns” in the United States of America, that, to use the same phrasing, “seem like they could use some mapping”, along with a screenshot of the (Carto) map of the area.

Sparing the full technical details, the program randomly picks an entry from an overpass export of all nodes that have any place tag and a population tag with a value of less than 1000 (hence the name “SmallTown”) in the USA (currently 11389), asks overpass whether there are 10 buildings or less in 800 meters around that node and if so, posts about it.

As the bot has been doing this for about 10 months now, there seem to be at least 300 places that match the above description. Naturally, I wondered, how Europe would fare in comparison. Chatting with the bot’s developer, Matthew Wildon (OSM, Fediverse), they told me, that they checked France for potential candidates and found none and then didn’t look into it any further.

What’s on on the Continent?

My interest was now piqued. Would a similar “SmallTownEurope” bot make any sense, or would it run out of things to post within a week? Or is Pascal Neis’ Unmapped Places of OpenStreetMap Result Map enough to find areas where mapping is needed?

Suffice it to say, I wouldn’t know the answer to that from purely looking at the map, I needed data. So I quickly got myself the above-mentioned Overpass Exports for Areas in Europe - where I was using the English Wikipedia definition of what’s in Europe: “[…] countries falling even partially under any common geographical or political definitions of Europe”. To cover most of the area of those countries, I also checked the “de facto independent countries with limited to no international recognition” (Abkhazia, Kosovo, Northern Cyprus, South Ossetia, Transnistria) as well as “dependencies and similar territories with broad autonomy [that] are also found within or close to Europe” (Aland, Guernsey, Jersey, Faroe Islands, Gibraltar, Greenland, Isle of Man, Svalbard).

Way to go!

263845 nodes fall into the definition of this survey (any place tag and a population tag with a value of less than 1000 and more than 0). I then asked poor Overpass for each one how many buildings there were in an 800-meter radius. That took about 3 days 😅

The beauty of knowing the buildings count for every node now is that we can easily adjust the parameters we’re looking at. When looking through the matches in Germany I found that some very well-mapped places could be considered “false positives”. 5 people living in a dwelling with 7 buildings is a very reasonable idea, but matches the “less or equal than 10 buildings” rule, so to get to my final numbers I added the filter “more people living there than buildings mapped”.

In the end, I arrived at 89338 matching towns (or 33.86%) with the 4 highest countries (Spain, Russia, Ukraine, Romania) making up 82.1845% of those matches (73422).

4 countries do not have a single match: Belgium, Malta, Norway and Switzerland

You want numbers, you say?

Alright then.

Table 1: Ordered by total matches in a country

Table 2: Ordered by percent of towns matched

^* There shall be no mapping in Ukraine for now

Where do we go from here?

I think it’s clear from the numbers, that working on a single match per day isn’t feasible. That would take 244½ years, and we can’t wait that long, can we?

There is now a MapRoulette Project for all matches except Ukraine and Russia.

If you have any other ideas or questions, let me know in the comments.

Have a lovely day.

K