Layer 1: Context

1.1. Administrative boundaries

You should have a good understanding of how administrative boundaries are defined within your city. That generally means that you should find out how your country is subdivided. Countries are often subdivided into provinces, states, or departments, which can then be broken down even further. Cities are often a specific administrative entities that form part of a bigger set. We encourage you to locate the national subdivisions first, and to try and locate the shapefiles of each of the administrative levels within the country. Loading the boundaries for all subdivisions within your country will make it much easier to aggregate up or scale down national data in the system. If you are unsure what the official subdivision in your country is and which entity manages these boundaries, we suggest you look at Wikipedia, where "Administrative divisions in COUNTRYNAME" often yields good results. See an example here.

Before you start looking for this, check to make sure we don't already have data for your country. See the existing subdivisions here. NOTE: you do not need to look for shapefiles of the country itself as all national boundaries have already been loaded into our system.

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