Where can I get neighborhood boundaries?

Question

Besides Zillow's creative-commons licensed neighborhood boundaries shapefiles, what sources of neighborhood boundaries are there? Not just in the US, but all over the world.

Free/open source is ideal, but paid sources could be interesting too.

Answer 1

SimpleGeo (before being acquired by Urban Airship) used to have a worldwide neighborhood boundaries layer. If you do some digging you may be able to troll up an old shapefile, or maybe a kind sole out there already has a copy that they would be willing to let you download.

Alternatively, WeoGeo still appears to have the SimpleGeo neighborhoods available. (Link1, Link2). (Disclaimer: I haven't tried this myself)

Lastly, I recently read an article about the Livehoods project - "Neighborhood Boundaries Generated using foursquare Social Media Data" that might prove to be a useful concept. It is...

the research effort by some keen Carnegie Mellon U mobile lab students (http://mcom.cs.cmu.edu/) analyzed 18 million Foursquare check-ins to spot algorithmic relationships between the spots people frequent. According to the work… “Livehoods looks at the geographic distance between venues, but also a form of `social distance’ that measures the degree of overlap in the people that check-in to them”.

Answer 2

I don't know what the state of mapping with this is, but OpenStreetMap has a place:neighbourhood tag (note the British spelling).

As the boundaries of neighborhoods are often nebulously defined I think no matter the source you will have to understand that using them for anything more than general display/labeling is going to be tricky.

Answer 3

Check out commercial data provider http://www.maponics.com for neighbourhood boundary data.

Answer 4

How about the Flickr Shapefiles which are constructed from the location tags people give geolocated pictures on the site.

Answer 5

Try http://www.urbanmapping.com/