Performing arts — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each point is a place where something is performed — a theatre, a cinema, an arts centre or a music venue, as tagged in OpenStreetMap. 111,828 of them worldwide, coloured by which of the four it is and sized by the footprint of the building.

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 four kinds

The colour answers one question: which kind of venue is this?

Theatres — `amenity=theatre`. 51,988, or 46.5% of the map. Everything from a national opera house to a studio above a pub, and also outdoor amphitheatres.
Cinemas — `amenity=cinema`. 31,112, or 27.8%. Multiplexes, single-screen picture houses and drive-ins alike.
Arts centres — `amenity=arts_centre`. 27,925, or 25.0%. A building that puts on more than one art form — the French centre culturel, the British arts centre, the German Kulturzentrum.
Music venues — `amenity=music_venue`. 803, or 0.7%. Rooms whose purpose is live music.

Every feature on this map has exactly one of those four, because all four are values of the same OpenStreetMap key and a feature carries one value or none. There is no "other" and no "unknown" here, and none is possible.

Casinos are deliberately not on this map. A casino is a plausible neighbour of a nightclub, but it is not a place a performance happens, and including it would turn the subject into "licensed entertainment venues" — vaguer, and a different map.

Where venues are thickest

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

France — 126.7 per million, 8,640 in total
Germany — 83.4 per million, 6,948
United States — 57.6 per million, 19,361
Australia — 50.0 per million, 1,330
United Kingdom — 47.8 per million, 3,232
Brazil — 18.8 per million, 4,074
Japan — 17.8 per million, 2,212
India — 2.9 per million, 4,122
China — 2.4 per million, 3,368
Indonesia — 1.9 per million, 515
Nigeria — 0.4 per million, 83

Germany's rate is about 29 times India's, which is moderate by the standards of this site — some layers here run into the hundreds or thousands. Read these as evidence rather than proof: they are what has been mapped, not what exists, and a country with keen mappers will look better provided than one without.

The four kinds are not equally well mapped, and it matters which you are looking at

The figure above is the layer as a whole, and it hides a genuine split. Taking the same Germany-to-India ratio class by class:

Cinemas — about 11. The most globally even thing on this map, and the one class where India outnumbers Germany outright: 2,182 cinemas against 1,454. A cinema is a commercial building that exists wherever there is an audience, and it is mapped accordingly.
Theatres — about 32. Well spread, with France at the top for the same reason it leads the layer overall.
Arts centres — about 148. The most concentrated class here, and the one to be careful about. A municipal centre culturel is a normal thing for a French town to own in a way it is not everywhere, so part of this is a real difference in how countries organise cultural provision — but at that level it is also partly a map of where the tag is used.
Music venues — effectively confined to the English- and German-speaking world. India has none at all, Nigeria none, Indonesia one. Live music certainly happens in all three; it is simply tagged there as a bar, a club or an arts centre rather than as a music venue.

So a reader comparing two countries on this map is comparing four different things at once, and the composition of a country's dots is often more informative than their number.

Two of these four have maps of their own

Theatres and cinemas each have their own layer, showing exactly the same objects as the corresponding class here — 51,988 and 31,112, agreeing to the feature. That is on purpose. This map spends its colour on which kind of venue a place is and has none left for anything else; a single-kind map can be read in ways this one cannot.

Arts centres and music venues appear nowhere else on this site. An arts centre and a music venue are performing arts, so giving them separate layers would have put the same objects on the site twice under two names. They are two of the four classes here, and this page is the only account of them HueMaps publishes.

If you want the visual arts rather than the performing ones, they are on the art galleries and shops map.

Half of this map is a point, not a shape

49.7% of the layer has no footprint at all. Only 56,265 of the 111,828 features are traced as an outline.

The size of a dot is therefore often not telling you how large the venue is. Untraced features are drawn at one nominal size, set at the median of those that do have a shape. Where a feature genuinely is traced, its size is real.

That half-and-half split is what a composite of its parts should look like: cinemas are 60.8% bare points, because a cinema is often a unit inside a shopping centre, and theatres 43.6%, because a theatre is usually a building of its own.

Not every venue here is a building

The largest features on this map are outdoor sites that host concerts — a park, a farm, an amphitheatre — tagged as though the whole site were the venue. The largest is 2,396,756 m², eighty-seven times the 99th percentile of the layer.

The size scale is capped well below them so that ordinary venues stay distinguishable from one another. A very large dot in open country is usually a field with a stage in it rather than a playhouse.

One technical exclusion: the selection matches each tag value exactly, so a feature tagged `amenity=theatre;cinema` — a building that is both — is missed. Multi-value tagging of this kind is uncommon.

Naming

88.3% carry a name, and the coverage splits by class: arts centres 95.0%, music venues 94.5%, cinemas 93.0% — but theatres only 81.9%, the lowest of the four and the largest of them. So the map is thinnest on detail exactly where it is densest, and roughly one theatre in five is an unnamed outline somebody traced.

Mapped, not modelled

Each feature is an object a mapper drew, from survey, local knowledge or a building they walked past. Nothing here is modelled or estimated, and no national register of venues 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 831 m², the 90th percentile 4,455 m² and the 99th 27,691 m².

A picture of the present

Today's map, not a history. OpenStreetMap is edited continuously; this copy is refreshed periodically. A venue shown here may have closed, and a closed theatre or cinema often keeps its building and its name for years.

Source and licence

Back to the map