August 3, 2026
Release of a globally distributed building footprint dataset for poverty and informal settlement areas
This dataset provides manually mapped building footprints for 44 poverty and informal settlement areas across Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe.
The dataset contains more than 321,075 single buildings footprints plus 4,661 building block polygons and provides spatial information at both individual building and aggregated building-block level. The building footprints were generated through Manual Visual Image Interpretation (MVII) using VHR satellite imagery and systematically harmonized according to a standardized mapping protocol. For 16 of the 44 study sites, a second observation time step is available, enabling multi-temporal analyses of urban morphological change. The dataset provides a globally distributed basis for comparative research on urban morphology, poverty and informal settlements, socio-spatial inequalities, remote sensing, Earth observation, and geospatial analysis.
The dataset is available through the DLR EOC Download Service [1]. A full description of the dataset [2], mapping methodology, data structure, and validation is provided in the associated Data Descriptor [3].
