Theatres — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each point is a theatre — a feature tagged `amenity=theatre` in OpenStreetMap. 51,988 of them worldwide, drawn as a dot 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.

Why this map has no colours

Everything here is one colour, and that is a decision rather than an omission.

`amenity=theatre` covers an enormous range — a national opera house, a receiving house on a high street, a village hall with a stage, a studio black box above a pub. Dividing them would be the useful thing to do, and OpenStreetMap has nothing to divide them by: `theatre:genre` is recorded on under 2% of features, and where it exists its values are free text rather than a fixed list.

A legend built on that would describe a fiftieth of the map and guess at the rest. So the map is sized by footprint instead, which does separate an opera house from a studio without pretending to know what either puts on, and the specifics come from clicking a feature.

Where theatres are thickest

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

France — 50.2 per million, 3,420 in total
Germany — 37.2 per million, 3,096
United States — 32.2 per million, 10,805
Australia — 24.5 per million, 651
United Kingdom — 23.6 per million, 1,597
Japan — 11.3 per million, 1,402
Brazil — 7.4 per million, 1,603
India — 1.2 per million, 1,672
China — 1.0 per million, 1,470
Indonesia — 0.6 per million, 157
Nigeria — 0.1 per million, 24

Germany's rate is about 32 times India's. That is a moderate figure by the standards of this site — some layers here run into the hundreds or thousands — and it puts theatres among the more evenly spread cultural things HueMaps maps. For comparison, art galleries run at about 131 and public bookcases at 3,793.

France at the top is the same pattern the arts centres show, and for a related reason: a municipal théâtre is a normal thing for a French town to own, in a way it is not everywhere.

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.

Not every theatre here is a building

The largest features on this layer are outdoor amphitheatres, which carry `amenity=theatre` quite legitimately and are an order of magnitude bigger than anything indoors. The largest is 853,380 m² — fifty-nine times the 99th percentile of the layer.

The size scale is capped well below them so that ordinary theatres stay distinguishable from one another. If you find a very large dot in the middle of nowhere, it is usually a bowl in a park rather than a playhouse.

Cinemas are not here. They are `amenity=cinema`, a different tag, and have their own layer. The two are together on the performing arts map along with arts centres and music venues, if you want to see how a place's venues divide up.

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

Two features in five are a point, not a shape

43.6% of this layer has no footprint at all. Only 29,307 of the 51,988 features are traced as an outline.

The size of a dot is therefore often not telling you how large the theatre 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.

Theatres do not crowd each other the way shops do — a theatre is normally a building of its own rather than a unit inside somebody else's — so this map stops at zoom 16, where the art galleries and books layers go deeper.

Naming

81.9% carry a name — the lowest of the four kinds of venue on the performing-arts map, and the largest group of them. So roughly one theatre in five is an unnamed outline somebody traced, and clicking it will tell you little.

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 theatres 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 752 m², the 90th percentile 3,501 m² and the 99th 14,369 m².

A picture of the present

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

Source and licence

Back to the map