Why import administrative areas? #
In some cases, it’s essential to create areas based on a specific administrative structure (cities, regions, countries, etc.). This allows you to:
- Compare your catchment areas with a reference administrative area (for example, regions)
- Build your catchment areas using an administrative boundary (departments, postal codes, districts, municipalities, etc.)
- Visualize existing administrative boundaries alongside your catchment areas
Some administrative boundaries are already available directly in the Smappen app.
List of administrative boundaries available in Smappen: #
| Country | Available administrative boundaries |
|---|---|
| United Kingdom | – Postcode districts – Postcode sectors – Postcodes (Northern Ireland) |
| United States | – States – Counties – ZIP codes |
| Canada | – Postal codes – Municipalities – Provinces / Territories |
| France | – French departments – Postcodes – Communes – Iris |
| Belgium | – Communes |
You can add these administrative boundaries to your map by clicking “Add an area” > “Administrative area.”
👉 See our tutorial: “Creating administrative areas”
Download administrative boundaries: #
First of all, you have to download data on the administrative divisions that are of interest. For example, you could visit the Opendatasoft website.
First, we should recommand to sort the results for a specific country : use the filters and add the name of the country you are looking for.
Make sure that you filter the search results in Opendatasoft, so that you only download the data on the areas you need.
If you try to display more than a few hundred areas on the smappen map, it will be significantly slowed down and user experience could be negatively impacted.
Before downloading the data for your areas, you can view them and select the ones that interest you using the “Map” tab:
Use the “Export” tab to download the date for your chosen areas in KML format:
To download the selected areas, click on “Only the X selected records” in the KML line:
For areas in other countries, you might be able to find data by searching the internet, for example by using the keyword “KML”, along with the area type and country in question.
Import your area boundaries
Create a new folder for your areas and import the KML file containing the areas’ data by dragging the file and dropping it onto the map.
To go further: