Melbourne as a game map: why we drew every building in the inner city

Open the map and you're looking at inner Melbourne the way a strategy game would draw it: every building extruded to its real height, every street with its real lane markings, and inside the buildings — the businesses that actually occupy them, each on its own card. No aerial photos, no generic pins. A hand-built canvas engine, and a city's worth of open data.

What you're looking at

Every box on the map is a real building footprint from OpenStreetMap, extruded from its recorded storeys or measured height. The towers along Collins and Bourke rise exactly as many floors as they do in life; the terraces of Fitzroy stay two storeys, parapets and all. When a building holds more than one business, a ×N badge tells you how many — click it and the whole building opens like a drawer.

Why the inner city, not “Greater Melbourne”

Melbourne the metropolis is enormous — thirty-one councils and nearly five million people. Melbourne the city you walk through is much smaller, and much denser. The map covers the part where the buildings and the businesses actually crowd together: the Hoddle Grid and Southbank, Docklands, Carlton, Fitzroy and Collingwood, Richmond, South Yarra and Prahran, South Melbourne, St Kilda, Brunswick and Footscray. An isometric map lives on density — drawn at metropolitan scale it would be a sea of empty paddocks between distant roofs. Drawn at inner-city scale, it looks like the Melbourne you know.

A city with two grids

Here's something you mostly notice from above: Melbourne runs on two street grids. The CBD's Hoddle Grid is tilted about twenty degrees off true north, surveyed in 1837 to follow the bend of the Yarra. Nearly everything around it — Carlton, Fitzroy, Brunswick, St Kilda — sits on the plain north–south survey grid. The two collide along Victoria Street, and the map wears that seam proudly: the suburbs sit square to the isometric axes, and the CBD leans into the bend of the river, exactly as it does from a plane window.

Where the data comes from

• OpenStreetMap — footprints, streets, parks, the Yarra, and the businesses themselves, maintained by thousands of local mappers (ODbL).
• The Australian Business Register — ABNs matched to listings, so the “Registered business” badge means what it says.
• G-NAF and the ABS Census — addresses, suburbs and postcodes kept honest, with the numbers behind every suburb.

Every card says where its facts came from and when they were last synced — and corrections flow back into the open datasets, so a fix here is a fix for everyone. The full list is on the about page.

What's next

The map is the start, not the finish. Trams and trains, heritage buildings, school catchments and more city layers are on the way — and if you run a business anywhere on the map, your building is already drawn. Claiming your card is free and takes about a minute.