Qipu
Vancouver · The city

The city, drawn from its own record

Nothing here is drawn by hand. Every building, street and decision comes from the city’s own public records — council’s minutes of 1970–1979 and 1995–2016, and its voting record since 2016.

Click any block to open its record, or drag the year.
154,108 buildings · 20,807 decisions you can open · 1970–2026, with gaps Every shape is a published record; nothing is modelled to fill a gap.How this map is made

Drawn from the City’s open data

154,108
building outlines, 153,985 with a LiDAR height
151,534
dated by the assessment roll, 1886–2022
184,169
public trees, 78,170 with a planting date
24,928
street and lane centrelines

The decisions

The panel lists the 7,383 items council voted on, from the City’s voting records, each with how it went. 1,716 name an address that the City’s address register places on a parcel; those light the map. Subjects are read from each item’s own words, and the rules are published with the data. The new-building and demolition dots are 18,824 permits the City’s staff issued since 2017, a separate record from council’s.

The earlier decisions come from council’s minutes of 1970–1979 on the Internet Archive: 22,159 motions read from the scanned pages, each with its mover and outcome where the page prints them. 2,127 name land the City’s registers still know — a lot, block and district lot on today’s assessment roll, or an address in the address register — and light the map; each opens the page it is printed on.

1995–2016 come from the minutes the City published on its website, as the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine saved them: 12,082 motions from the documents it kept — most meetings of the late 1990s, fewer after, and none for some years. 2,175 name an address or land the City’s registers still know and light the map; each opens the saved copy.

How tall

Heights are the median height above ground measured over each outline from Natural Resources Canada’s 1-metre LiDAR of the region, flown in 2016 (surface minus bare earth). 153,985 of 154,108 outlines had enough returns to measure; the rest stand at a nominal 3 m and are flagged in the data.

When it appears

A building appears in the year the 2025 assessment roll gives for the parcel it stands on (151,534 of 154,108 outlines). That year describes buildings still standing: the map shows the 1886 buildings that survive, not the city of 1886. Buildings with no dated parcel are drawn in every year.

The ground and the water

The ground is the same LiDAR survey’s bare-earth model. The land stops at the City’s own shoreline, traced from 2002 orthophotos and closed along the eastern city limit. No bathymetry is drawn: the water is one flat depth.

What is not here

Outlines are the City’s 2015 tracing, so a building finished later is missing. Colours follow the parcel’s zoning district, not the building’s use, which the roll does not publish. Street widths are nominal: the City publishes right-of-way widths without a unit.

Where this comes from

The data files: manifest.json