Notes
Sydney has never kept a register of when its buildings went up. SydMap pieces one together, building
by building, from open data.
What you are looking at
All 29,844 buildings of the City of Sydney and North Sydney, either side of the
Harbour Bridge, as they stand today. Each is coloured by the age of the city it belongs to, from the convict town to
Barangaroo. Move along the line at the bottom to see the city in any year, or press play to watch it go up.
Getting around
Drag the city to turn it round. To slide it along, drag with the right button or hold Shift; to come closer,
scroll or pinch. Move the sun along the line, or press play, to change the year; choose a building to read about it.
How each year is known
Every building carries the best evidence there is, and its card says which.
- Documented –
- A year from Wikidata, from the opening of its Wikipedia article (for heritage-listed places, written from the NSW
State Heritage Inventory) or from OpenStreetMap.
- Strata plan –
- Apartment buildings are strata-titled when they are finished, so the year their plan was registered dates them.
Plans since 1994 carry their date in the NSW cadastre; older ones are placed by their number, back to 1961, when
strata title began.
- Heritage –
- The other buildings of a State Heritage Register listing take the listing's years. Buildings the City marks as
part of a heritage area's historic fabric are dated from the documented heritage buildings around them.
- Neighbours –
- The rest take the years of the dated buildings around them of a similar height. Towers over 46 m, Sydney's
height limit until 1957, only take later years.
Estimated years are paler on the map and marked “c.” on the cards, with the range they come from. Read them as a
period, not a date.
Heights
From OpenStreetMap where it has them, otherwise modelled from satellite imagery by GlobalBuildingAtlas, or assumed
to be two storeys. Storeys are counted where they are mapped and otherwise worked out at 3.2 m a floor.
Take the data with you
Every building, with its year, the evidence for it, its age, heritage and sources, is yours to sort, query and
map: in a spreadsheet, QGIS or Python. Open Database Licence, as it comes from OpenStreetMap.
Where the data comes from
Downloaded in October 2026.
- Footprints Overture Maps (2026-09-23),
from OpenStreetMap and Microsoft's machine-learned footprints. ODbL, © OpenStreetMap contributors.
- Heights OpenStreetMap; elsewhere GlobalBuildingAtlas
(Zhu et al., TU Munich, 2025), CC BY-NC 4.0, one more reason SydMap is non-commercial. The downloads leave
these modelled heights out.
- Landmarks The Opera House's shells follow the spherical geometry they were built to, as Ove Arup &
Partners' Michael Lewis describes it (Royal Society of NSW, 1973).
The Harbour Bridge is built from its published figures: two 28-panel arch trusses, a 504 m span, a 134 m summit.
- Boundaries and strata plans NSW Spatial Services, CC BY 4.0.
- Heritage The State Heritage Register (Heritage NSW) and the local environmental plans' heritage maps (NSW
Department of Planning), CC BY 4.0; heritage area contributions from the City of Sydney's Development Control
Plan 2012, CC BY 4.0.
- Stories City of Sydney open data (Aboriginal history places from Barani; Developing Sydney 1900–1920 from
the City of Sydney Archives), CC BY 4.0; OpenStreetMap, ODbL.
- Names, photos, histories Wikidata (CC0), Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) and Wikimedia Commons; each photo credits
its author and licence.
Add to it
The code and the data pipeline are open on GitHub.
Know a piece of Sydney's history that lives in its buildings? Add it as a story: a list of buildings, a few lines
on each, and the source it rests on.
The original idea
SydMap rebuilds LAYRS: Amsterdam
by Alex Barakov (MIT licence),
itself inspired by Sasha Bogachev's Paris, building by building,
for Sydney and from Sydney's own open data.
SydMap acknowledges the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the Traditional Custodians of the land
the City of Sydney stands on, and the Cammeraygal people, the Traditional Custodians of the land of North Sydney.
Sovereignty was never ceded.
