Address grids in the Philippines

Abstract

We use OpenStreetMap data to reveal grid address patterns in the Philippines. Thus such patterns, common in the Americas, also exist in Asia too.

Keywords: address grids, Philippines, OpenStreetMap

1. Introduction

   Examining house numbers in parts of Manila, Philippines, we find they often get quite high, into the thousands. And many parallel streets' homes often have tandem / lockstep numbering. Indeed these are part of an address grid!

   
   Figure 1: House address grids observed in Sampaloc, Manila.

   For example, no matter what street we take, when it crosses España Boulevard we enter its 900 block. After we go past P. Florentino Street, houses addresses on either side of the street are in the 1000 block, etc. Indeed we can start building a table,

   900	España Boulevard
   1000	P. Florentino Street
   1100	Piy Margal Street

2. Ordinances

   All I could find was

   • An Ordinance Providing for the Numbering of Houses and Other Buildings in Quezon City

   which is a simpler system for the community neighboring to the east.

3. Baselines

   Extrapolating, the "0" line would appear to lie in the Pasig River. Of course so far we have only discussed one of the two axes.

4. Methods

   1. https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/search?q=addr reveals we want addr:housenumber.

   2. On Overpass Turbo we query for it.

   3. Then we used our Makefile to make the above image and KMZ.

To be presented at the 2025 OpenStreetMap State of the Map conference.

¹https://www.jidanni.org/

Last modified: 2025-02-10 00:16:18 UTC