1.1. Boundaries

Layer 1: Urban context

You should have a good understanding of how administrative boundaries are defined within your city. That generally means that you should find out how your country is subdivided. Countries are often subdivided into provinces, states, or departments, which can then be broken down even further. Cities are often a specific administrative entities that form part of a bigger set. We encourage you to locate the national subdivisions first, and to try and locate the shapefiles of each of the administrative levels within the country. Loading the boundaries for all subdivisions within your country will make it much easier to aggregate up or scale down national data in the system. If you are unsure what the official subdivision in your country is and which entity manages these boundaries, we suggest you look at Wikipedia, where "Administrative divisions in COUNTRYNAME" often yields good results. See an example here.

Before you start looking for this, check to make sure we don't already have data for your country. See the existing subdivisions here.

Discussion and questions

Madzy Korte Apeldoorn 324 points

3 years, 9 months ago

Hi Aristide and Carolin,

Yesterday I was looking for shapefiles for the various NUTS levels for Apeldoorn and I found datasets as:
https://www.pdok.nl/downloads/-/article/bestuurlijke-grenzen#7d4d65faaa47d99495f87bb77392f833 or https://www.pdok.nl/introductie/-/article/cbs-gebiedsindelingen. Although I can open these files in QGIS and they look like very nice maps and detailed, they aren't shapefiles and I also cannot make shapefiles from them. Also for layer 1.6 Land use (a bit ahead but same question), on PDOK there is also data but all seem to be embedded in different file type or a geoservice (WMS or WFS) which is not the shapefile you asked for. Is it also okay to use these type of datasets or do you have a suggestion for how to deal with this?

Many thanks,
Madzy

Paul Hoekman Johannesburg 2140 points

3 years, 9 months ago

Hi Madzy, quick question... often if you can open a file in QGIS, you can export from there into the shapefile format. Does that work for those files? Here is a tutorial on how to save it in QGIS.

Madzy Korte Apeldoorn 324 points

3 years, 9 months ago

Hi Paul, I tried this yesterday and thought it didn't work but I tried it again and it actually does, thank you!

Carolin Bellstedt Metro Vancouver Regional District 1280 points

3 years, 9 months ago

Hey Madzy,
Great to hear! Just as a reminder and I've also clarified that in the M1 exercise description and instruction sheet: You don't have to add shapefiles for NUTS2, 3 and country. Those are already in the system. I've tagged them with the CL cities, so they should show up for you now too.

As for the question around WMS or WFS. I looked into this and WFS is the way to go, because those are the vector files and has shp files, as is in the PDOK description. WMS on the other hand is "raster" data, which doesn't help us.

You can simply do what has worked for you now, as Paul said. Alternatively, you can also do the following:

select json data, which gives you something like in this example.
In your browser, click file > save page as and then add .json at the end;
Finally, you can convert from Json to ESRI shapefile with a tool like https://mygeodata.cloud/

Also, I've come across this QGIS WFS tool from PDOK, but I don't know if that helps you at all.

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Layer 1: Urban context

1.1. Boundaries

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