Building outlines

Buildings are ways (or multipolygons) tagged building=…. Footprints are dense: keep the area small, or the answer becomes very large.

The query

[out:json][timeout:25];
way["building"](46.945,7.440,46.952,7.458);
out geom;

Run it

Live result from overpass.ch, cached for up to 12 hours. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).

How it works

1. ["building"] without a value matches every building type (house, apartments, church, …).
2. out geom; returns each outline with coordinates.

Variations

• Add rel["building"] in a union to include buildings with courtyards.
• For the buildings of a whole city, use a regional extract (for example Geofabrik) instead of Overpass.

Run it from your code

curl https://api.overpass.ch/v1/YOUR_API_KEY/interpreter \
  --data-urlencode 'data@query.overpassql'

import requests

query = open("query.overpassql").read()
r = requests.post("https://api.overpass.ch/v1/YOUR_API_KEY/interpreter",
                  data={"data": query}, timeout=120)
r.raise_for_status()
print(r.json()["elements"][:3])

const res = await fetch("https://api.overpass.ch/v1/YOUR_API_KEY/interpreter", {
  method: "POST",
  body: new URLSearchParams({ data: query }),
});
if (!res.ok) throw new Error(await res.text());
console.log(await res.json());

Save the query as query.overpassql. It works the same in Overpass Turbo, QGIS and JOSM.