After the publication of 14 maps dedicated to individual cities in Russia, a large interactive all-Russian map of the age of houses appeared in the special project of Kon-Tiki Publishers as the how-old-is-this.house project. In addition to the article about the research results, I have prepared a behind-the-scenes story about the data.

I will tell you about how the data was collected and how it can be used.

The life of the how-old-is-this.house project began with the release of the map of St. Petersburg in 2020, which was compiled by Nikita Slavin, the founder of the Kon-Tiki publishing house. Then, 6 more maps were released for Moscow, Vladimir, Kazan, Yekaterinburg, Voronezh, Kaliningrad, and Arkhangelsk, for which data were collected from various sources and meticulously processed by the authors (the Kaliningrad map was my first painstaking project). In the spring of 2021, we met programmer Alexander Kachkaev, who became interested in the project and wanted to automate the process of creating maps of the age of houses. This is how the script came into being.

Tooling for how-old-is-this.house — is a script and a tool kit, written in TypeScript and which can be used via the command line interface. A configuration file needs to be created for each individual territory

The automation brought significant relief to the authors and had several important advantages:

• Data collection became faster – up to 2-3 days;
• A unified algorithm allows for data standardization and eliminates the human factor;
• The script conducts address standardization, minimizing the reliance on geocoding;
• The script provides a convenient tool for collecting data from the Rosreestr (Federal Service for State Registration, Cadastre and Cartography).

With the help of the new script assistant, maps of Penza, Nizhny Novgorod, Kirov, Krasnodar, Volgograd, and Tomsk have appeared. However, in practice, the creative role of the author has not lost its significance: solving technical problems related to the source data, as well as extensive post-processing, still rests on the shoulders of the cartographers.

The emergence of a universal tool led us to think if could we gather all the information about buildings in Russia in one go.

The answer to this ambitious question turned out to be negative. Russia is very vast, computational resources are limited, and the open data available are imperfect.

We chose a different task and decided to collect data on the cities of Russia, the largest ones, where almost half of the country's population lives in total. The list was formed based on the 2010 census data, to which we expertly added some fast-growing cities.