Nepal's cities are growing faster than our understanding of the risks inside them.

Urban Atlas Nepal is an open data and methodology layer for understanding urban risk and planning across Nepal's cities, structuring scattered, secondary research into ward-level intelligence that's usable for real decisions.

What we're building

Urban Atlas Nepal is the data and methodology layer.

SmartHousing Nepal is an application built on top of it: currently covering Kathmandu Valley's 247 wards, helping residents and municipal planners factor flood and earthquake hazard, and air quality exposure, into housing and budget decisions.

As the underlying atlas matures, it's designed to support future applications and additional cities, always keeping the core risk data open.

“Urban Atlas Nepal is the data and methodology layer. SmartHousing Nepal is an application built on it, currently covering Kathmandu Valley, with future applications and cities planned as the platform grows.”
1

Urban Atlas Nepal

Platform: methodology, data standards, national framing.

2

SmartHousing Nepal

Product line: expand to other cities over time.

3

Live today

SmartHousing: Kathmandu Valley

247 wards, flood and earthquake hazard, and air quality exposure.

The risks Nepal's cities face don't arrive one at a time

Flood hazard, earthquake hazard, air quality, disaster preparedness, infrastructure gaps: cities experience all of these together, but the data describing them almost never does. Studies live in separate PDFs, separate agencies, separate silos, with no shared ward-level view connecting them.

Urban Atlas Nepal exists to close that gap: a single layer where climate risk, safety, and planning data can be structured, compared, and built on, regardless of which application sits on top of it.

Our first lens is housing, through SmartHousing Nepal. The layer underneath is built to carry more.

Urban Safety
Climate Risk
Resilience
Infrastructure
Disaster Risk
+ more as the atlas grows

Applications Built on the Atlas

Live now

SmartHousing Nepal

Our first application, SmartHousing Nepal, applies this atlas to housing decisions across Kathmandu Valley.

247 wards

3 map layers

Kathmandu Valley current scope

Currently scoped to Kathmandu Valley. Expansion to other cities is planned as data and partnerships allow.

Open SmartHousing Nepal
In exploration

More applications, same atlas

As real usage from SmartHousing validates demand, we expect the atlas to support use cases, evaluated one application at a time.

Partner with us

Built by Open Knowledge Foundation Nepal

Urban Atlas Nepal is built by Open Knowledge Foundation Nepal (OKF Nepal), a Kathmandu-based civic technology and open data nonprofit.

Learn more about OKF Nepal