Libraries on foot

Every public library OpenStreetMap knows about, plus the branches leafle checks for books on the shelf, the libraries on the official registers of Mexico, Argentina, the Western Cape and Medellín, and, in China, where OpenStreetMap holds under half of them, the libraries China's national public culture portal and Zhejiang's provincial one list. Each is given 5, 10 and 30 minute walking isochrones by the Mapbox Isochrone API. The world is divided into H3 hexagons of about a tenth of a square kilometre, the same size everywhere on Earth, and each isochrone adds the exact fraction of every hexagon it covers, so a walk that covers a tenth of a hexagon adds 0.1. A hexagon's value is how many libraries a spot inside it can walk to, on average.

"Per person" uses the two-step floating catchment area method: each library's capacity is shared among everyone living within its walk, and each hexagon adds up its share of every library it can reach, giving libraries per 10,000 people. It shows provision rather than where people are, which a map of access alone mostly does.

Library locations © OpenStreetMap contributors; the public-library registers of Mexico (Secretaría de Cultura, Sistema de Información Cultural), Argentina (CONABIP, CC BY 4.0), the Western Cape (Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport) and Medellín (Sistema de Bibliotecas Públicas); and in China 国家公共文化云 (the National Public Culture Cloud) and 浙江智慧文化云 (Zhejiang's). Walks: Mapbox Isochrone API. Population: WorldPop Global2 2025 (R2025A, 1 km, adjusted to UN totals), CC BY 4.0.