Kathmandu Living Labs — Open Cities Mapping for Seismic Resilience

Before 2012, Kathmandu Valley — located on an active seismic fault line — had no reliable digital map of its buildings, schools or hospitals, leaving a major blind spot for disaster planning. In November 2012, the Government of Nepal, the World Bank's GFDRR, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and USAID launched the Open Cities Kathmandu project to close this gap.

The project aimed to build an open, crowdsourced digital map of Kathmandu's building stock, road network and critical facilities (schools and health centres) to support disaster-risk planning and response.

Student volunteers, including a partnership with George Washington University, combined remote digitisation with door-to-door verification. Over roughly two years they digitised building footprints, mapped the road network, and structurally surveyed schools and health facilities, while training more than 1,500 residents in OpenStreetMap editing. The team formalised as the nonprofit Kathmandu Living Labs (KLL) in 2013 and later broadened into youth digital-skills training, civic engagement, and pandemic and flood-response mapping.

By project end, the team had digitised footprints for 126,105 buildings, mapped 3,716 km of road network, and structurally surveyed 2,256 schools and 350 health facilities. When a magnitude-7.8 earthquake struck on 25 April 2015, KLL and HOT rapidly updated the open map with damage assessments and road-passability data, which the Nepal Army, Nepal Red Cross and international relief agencies used for emergency response. KLL later contributed to Nepal's Rural Housing Reconstruction Programme. By its own reporting, KLL has since run 30+ projects, engaged more than 5,000 people, held 200+ events and works with over 40 partner organisations.

The project demonstrates a clear, real-world use case (the 2015 earthquake response) for open crowdsourced disaster-risk mapping, but public sources document mainly process and output metrics rather than a controlled evaluation of impact on casualties or reconstruction time. The model also remains dependent on donor funding from the World Bank/GFDRR, HOT and USAID.