Neighbourhood colours of Basel

Basel-Stadt’s Statistical Office turns #landcover into art with “#Quartierfarben”, an interactive tool that maps each neighbourhood’s mix of green space, traffic, water and buildings and lets you turn it into a downloadable postcard. Built in the spirit of Vienna’s “Grätzlfarben” and Berlin’s “Kiezcolors” and released as #opensource, it’s a playful meeting of #dataviz and #geoinformation.
Author

Ralph Straumann

Published

July 9, 2026

The Statistical Office of the Canton Basel-Stadt published a visualisation of the landcover of the city’s neighbourhoods. Termed “Quartierfarben” (German for “neighbourhood colours”), the project is grounded rather in art than in scientific data visualisation, but not a bit less intriguing for it. The “Quartierfarben” are published as an interactive web app and as a piece in a printed magazine “Dossier Basel”1 and its pdf version.

The Quartierfarben web app

The “Quartierfarben” distinguish traffic, green areas, forest, residential areas, work & education areas, water, culture & leisure areas, industrial areas and other landcover types. The web app allows you to explore the landcover of the different neighbourhoods of Basel interactively and then to create (and download, not send) a postcard for a location of your choosing. I find this a very neat approach to make (sometimes quite abstract) data explorable and eventually tangible.

Quartierfarben as a postcard (source: Emphase)

The whole project builds on (and extends) “Grätzlfarben” (by the Technical University of Vienna) and “Kiezcolors” (by ODIS Berlin) which have done a similar analysis and visualisation for Vienna and Berlin, respectively. The code for the “Quartierfarben” is open-source under the MIT license on GitHub.

Footnotes

  1. Minuscule footnote: Oddly (to me), this magazine of the Statistical Office is sold / has a paid subscription. This reminds me of an event organised by the office that also charged an entry fee, which surprised me a lot from a cantonal institution.↩︎