Markets — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each point is a marketplace — a feature tagged `amenity=marketplace` in OpenStreetMap. 95,586 of them worldwide, drawn as a dot sized by the footprint of the market and coloured by whether it is a building.

A marketplace is the place a market is held: a covered hall, a square that fills with stalls twice a week, a permanent street of traders, a wholesale complex on the edge of a city. All of those are here.

Click any feature to see what OpenStreetMap records about it — who runs it, and its website. Where it has a Wikipedia article, a short summary is fetched live and shown in your own language; and every feature links to the OpenStreetMap object it came from.

The one map on this site that is not a map of Europe

Counted crudely — features inside a country's boundary, per million people:

France — 60.1 per million, 4,108 in total
Germany — 26.5 per million, 2,208
Indonesia — 20.0 per million, 5,624
Brazil — 15.7 per million, 3,393
United Kingdom — 12.3 per million, 840
United States — 9.0 per million, 3,016
Australia — 8.2 per million, 219
Japan — 5.2 per million, 639
China — 4.1 per million, 5,784
Nigeria — 3.3 per million, 741
India — 2.7 per million, 3,860

Germany's rate is about 10 times India's. Almost every other layer on this site carries a warning at this point about how much of what you are seeing is really a map of where OpenStreetMap's contributors live. This one carries the opposite. Ten is the flattest figure HueMaps has: places of worship run at about 18, theatres at 32, art galleries at 131, and electric vehicle charging at nearly 1,500.

The two most crowded views on the whole layer are the evidence rather than an exception to it. The busiest tile at low zoom is in Bangladesh; the busiest at street level is Lima. Neither is in Europe, and on most of the layers here both would be.

Read these as evidence rather than proof. They are what has been mapped, not what exists.

What the two colours mean, and what they do not

Covered market — the feature also carries a `building` tag, so somebody has recorded that the market is inside a structure. 20,706 features, 21.7% of the layer.

Not recorded — everything else. 74,880 features, 78.3%.

That grey row is a statement about the record, not about the market, and it is easy to misread. Of the 57,654 markets that somebody has drawn as an outline, 35.1% carry a building tag. Of the 39,697 mapped as a single point, only 2.5% do — because a point has no shape and so cannot be a building. Most of the grey is markets nobody has traced yet, not markets held in the open air.

If you want the covered halls on their own, untick the grey row in the legend. What is left is the world's market buildings — Les Halles, the Mercado Central, Borough Market and about twenty thousand less famous ones.

Why there is no legend for what is sold

This is the obvious thing to want from a map of markets, and OpenStreetMap does not record it. Counted over all 97,351 marketplace objects in OpenStreetMap — slightly more than the 95,586 features drawn here, because a market recorded both as a point and as an outline is merged into one:

`market:type` — 3 features
`produce` — 16
`marketplace:type` — 265
`organic` — 934
`shop` — 1,808, and its commonest value is `furniture`
`second_hand` 70, `cuisine` 38, `food` 32, `clothes` 9, `flea_market` 0

A fruit-and-vegetable-against-clothes legend would describe three markets in a hundred thousand and guess at the rest. HueMaps does not draw a layer finer than its data supports, so it is not drawn, and this section exists so that its absence reads as an answer rather than an oversight.

The same goes for how often a market is held. A permanent covered hall and a square that has stalls on Saturdays are both `amenity=marketplace`, and no tag with usable coverage separates them either.

Two features in five are a point, not a shape

39.7% of this layer has no footprint at all. Only 57,677 of the 95,586 features are traced as an outline.

The size of a dot is therefore often not telling you how large the market is. Untraced features are drawn at one nominal size, set at the median of those that do have a shape. Where a feature is traced, its size is real — and on this layer it does real work, because the difference between a market hall and a market square is largely a difference of area.

One technical exclusion: the selection matches the tag exactly, so a feature tagged `amenity=marketplace;…` — a market that is also something else — is missed. Multi-value tagging of this kind is uncommon.

Naming

77.2% carry a name, and the covered halls are named slightly more often than the rest at 80.1%. So about one market in five is an outline or a point somebody recorded without a name, and clicking it will tell you little.

Mapped, not modelled

Each feature is an object a mapper drew, from survey, local knowledge or a market they walked through. Nothing here is modelled or estimated, and no national register of markets has been merged in.

Size

Each symbol is sized by the footprint of the feature, in square metres measured on the globe. Symbol area is proportional to that (radius to its square root).

Among the traced features, the median footprint is 2,459 m², the 90th percentile 20,968 m² and the 99th 136,256 m².

The largest is the Marché international de Rungis outside Paris at 2,071,289 m² — the wholesale market that supplies the city, and fifteen times the 99th percentile. The size scale is capped well below it so that ordinary markets stay distinguishable from one another.

A picture of the present

Today's map, not a history. OpenStreetMap is edited continuously; this copy is refreshed periodically. A market shown here may have stopped trading, and a market square usually keeps its name and its shape long after it does.

Source and licence

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