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 NUTS3 boundaries as all EU NUTS3 boundaries have already been loaded into our system. See here.

NOTE: you do not need to look for shapefiles of the NUTS2 boundaries as all EU NUTS2 boundaries have already been loaded into our system. See 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. See here.

Demographic data including at a minimum population figures for the entire city for the past 5 years. Also look for data on population forecasts. Ideally demographic data is available at a more fine grained level as well: broken down by age group, gender, and most importantly population numbers for each local subdivision.

Locate a document or various documents that provide sector descriptions for your location. The key sectors that make up the bulk of economic activity should be described. This document does not need to be exclusively dedicated to describing these sectors, but it must provide an insightful breakdown of the local economy. Note that this is not about data (numbers), but we are instead looking for a descriptive document.

Economic reports of the city or area, or more general "city profile" reports from the government may be a good place to start.

Find data on key local economic activities. These figures should ideally include GDP and number of people employed in key sectors (or better yet, in the entire local economy, broken down by sector). Try to find data for at least 3 years - the more recent, the better. Governmental reports are preferred.

What policies are related to topics around material stocks and flows within your territory? These can include policies around air pollution, mining, circularity, water quality standards, etc.

How is land being used? Available information likely comes from local government bodies in charge of urban planning or zoning. Classifications typically include options like Residential, Industry, Agriculture, etc. Ideally this information is available in a shapefile format. Reports or images that instead describe or visualise the land use can alternatively be used.

There are various different classification standards out there when it comes to land use reporting. This presentation provides a good overview. We have not yet defined a standard for reporting in Metabolism of Cities and are likely depending on the available local classifications, so for now aim to collect whatever information is out there and once we have taken stock of the various classifications we may decide to try and standardise this or not.

The goal is to get a map or shapefiles that show how the zoning is divided. Some sort of classification could be according to industry, commerce, vacant land, green space, housing etc. (It is not about obtaining infrastructure data.)