Data contribution hub

Porto
Back

Layer 1: Context

1.1. Administrative boundaries

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. NOTE: you do not need to look for shapefiles of the country itself as all national boundaries have already been loaded into our system.

Inventory

Title Type Author(s) Year
NUTS 2 - 2016 Shapefile EUROSTAT 2020 Add image
NUTS 3 - 2016 Shapefile EUROSTAT 2020 Add image
Portugal districts boundaries Shapefile GADM 2018 Add image

Upload new item

Discussion and questions


I have a general question regarding the geocode scheme. I tried to add the one for Portugal after having made a new scheme "subdivisions of Portugal" (https://staf.metabolismofcities.org/geocode/34152/). After I click on safe, it does a system update and then allows me to enter the names for the different levels. Once I click on safe again, it does another system update and afterwards all levels have "disappeared". Either they are deleted/not saved or they are simply not visible to me anymore. I tried to change "Areas of South Africa", since we already have the existing subdivisions one and to test it out, but it also wouldn't allow me to save my changes (only in the name of the geocode scheme), but not in the levels. What could be the issue here? Am I doing something wrong?


I'll have a look and sort this out, stay tuned!


Hi Carolin,


I've done some additional checking here and made some changes for improved presentation and navigation of this section. However, when I tested this it all seemed to work well with regards to saving the information. So I am not sure if this actually solves the problem for you. Can you try again? If it doesn't work, can you try another browser? Anything but Safari. If it still doesn't work, is it possible to send a screencast for debugging purposes?


Thanks!


Hi Paul,
Perhaps the issue was that it didn't work in the front-end. Since there was no edit button now anymore, I figured out how to do it in the back-end and that worked.
Are there any rules already around language yet? For now I've put the English name and then the original Portuguese name in brackets behind it.


In any case, it seems a good exercise to do for anyone starting a city, or at least to become familiar with those levels (if they already exist in our system for a country), as I heard from the ones doing the course atm and trying to figure out shapefiles and data, that it is the first time that they are facing and learning about those various levels, especially around data of municipalities, metropolitan areas and cities.


Can you send me a screenshot of the page? You should be able to see the edit button. In general we should try to not change any of this in the back-end as certain mechanisms of logging and control aren't built in there.


And yeah it's a good exercise in general so we should indeed likely see how to include this in the course -- but I would say just have people define this things without actually editing the official list which is reserved for more veteran users.


Oops, I thought it was fine to do it there. Good to know. Attached is the page of what I see in Firefox, same in Chrome btw.


Yes, agreed, definitely.


Thanks. Can you show me the entire screen? I want to see the user privileges which are shown at the very top of the screen.


👀🙈 I wasn't signed in (on that sub-site). Now that I am, I can see the edit button. My bad, sorry for the confusion and troubles Paul.


Ahhh that explains things ;-)


Okay good to see this is sorted.

Log in to join the conversation

Sign Up Log In