Urban Science Beyond Samples: Up-to-Date Street Network Models and Indicators for Every Urban Area in the World

2026-04-30

AI Summary

This study addresses the absence of a globally consistent, real-time street network model and associated metrics in urban planning, which hinders effective assessment of urban resilience and accessibility—particularly limiting localized interventions in resource-constrained regions. Leveraging the 2025 Global Human Settlement Layer to define urban boundaries, the authors integrate 180 million nodes and 360 million edges from OpenStreetMap to construct the first comprehensive, non-sampled, and reusable street network model spanning 10,351 urban areas across 189 countries. The resulting framework enables linkage with hundreds of urban attribute datasets and is publicly released as open-source code, data, and standardized metrics. This work substantially advances global street network science and strengthens urban analytical capacity in under-resourced and less-developed regions.

Abstract

Urban planners need up-to-date, global, and consistent street network models and indicators to measure resilience and performance, model accessibility, and target local quality-of-life interventions. This article presents up-to-date street network models and indicators for every urban area in the world. It uses 2025 urban area boundaries from the Global Human Settlement Layer, allowing users to join these data to hundreds of other urban attributes. Its workflow ingests 180 million OpenStreetMap nodes and 360 million OpenStreetMap edges across 10,351 urban areas in 189 countries. The code, models, and indicators are publicly available for reuse. These resources unlock worldwide urban street network science beyond samples as well as local analyses in under-resourced regions where models and indicators are otherwise less-accessible.

Problem

• street network
• urban planning
• global urban data
• urban resilience
• accessibility

Innovation

• street network modeling
• global urban analysis
• OpenStreetMap
• urban indicators
• open data