Performing arts — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each dot is a place where something is performed, a theatre, a cinema, an arts centre or a music venue. There are more than 110,000 worldwide. Colour represents which of the four it is, and the size of a dot represents the footprint of the building. Click on any of them to see what OpenStreetMap records, such as who runs it and its website. If there's a Wikipedia article, we show a short summary and a link to the full article, in your own language where possible.

Where the data comes from

Every venue here is something a mapper added at the OpenStreetMap website, from a survey, from local knowledge or from a building they walked past. We don't model or estimate anything ourselves, and we haven't merged in any national register of venues.

What we include

Four exact tags, all values of one OpenStreetMap key:

`amenity=theatre`, more than 50,000 features and a little under half the map, from a national opera house to a studio room above a pub, and outdoor amphitheatres too.
`amenity=cinema`, more than 30,000 features and rather over a quarter. Multiplexes, single-screen picture houses and drive-ins all count.
`amenity=arts_centre`, more than 27,000 features and about a quarter. A building that puts on more than one art form, such as the French centre culturel or the German Kulturzentrum.
`amenity=music_venue`, more than 800 features. A room whose purpose is live music.

Every feature has exactly one of the four, because the key takes one value or none. Casinos are left out, because a casino is not a place a performance happens. Because we match each value exactly, a building tagged as a theatre and a cinema together is missed.

Colour

Colour represents which of the four kinds a venue is, and the mixture in a town often tells you more than the number of dots. The four are not equally well mapped, so read the colours before reading how crowded an area looks. Music venues are recorded almost only in English-speaking and German-speaking countries, and live music elsewhere is tagged as a bar, a club or an arts centre instead. Arts centres are the most unevenly spread of the four.

Two of these four have maps of their own

Theatres and cinemas each have a layer to themselves, showing the same objects as the matching colour here. This map spends its colour on which kind of venue a place is, so a single-kind map can be read in ways this one cannot. Arts centres and music venues appear nowhere else on the site, because a separate layer would show the same objects twice.

Size

The size of a dot represents the footprint of the venue in square metres. About half of this map has no outline at all, and we draw those at one nominal size, so often the size is not telling you how large the venue is. The share differs by kind, because a cinema is often a unit inside a shopping centre while a theatre is usually a building of its own. Among the venues that do have a shape, a typical one covers about 830 m².

The largest features are outdoor sites that host concerts, tagged as though a whole park or farm were the venue. The largest covers more than two square kilometres, and we cap the size scale well below that so ordinary venues stay distinguishable.

Where the map is empty

An empty area means nobody has mapped a venue there, not that nothing is performed there. Mapping is more complete in western Europe, North America and Australia than in much of Africa and southern Asia, so an area showing cinemas alone may well have theatres nobody has recorded.

Up to date, mostly

OpenStreetMap is edited continuously, and we take a new copy once every one to three months. A venue shown here may have closed, and a closed theatre or cinema often keeps its building for years.

Source and licence

Back to the map