Outlines of the French departments from OpenStreetMap

Exports of the French administrative division at the departmental level (districts of departments) from OpenStreetMap produced in the vast majority from the cadastre.

This data comes from crowdsourcing carried out by the contributors to the OpenStreetMap project and is under ODbL license which requires identical sharing and the mandatory attribution mention must be “© OpenStreetMap contributors under ODbL license” in accordance with http://osm.org/copyright

This is a semi-automatic export with lighter and topologically verified geometries (no overlap). From 2016, the geometries are original, unsimplified.

Descriptive of the content of “departments” files

Origin

The data comes from the OpenStreetMap cartographic database.
These were established from the cadastre made available by DGFiP on cadastre.gouv.fr.
In addition on Mayotte where the cadastre is not available on cadastre.gouv.fr, the route of the coasts was produced from the aerial images of Bing.

More info: http://prev.openstreetmap.fr/36680-communes

Format

These files are available in shapefile format, in WGS84 projection with several levels of detail (until 2015):

— simplification at 5 m
— simplification at 50 m
— simplification at 100 m

The topology is retained during the simplification process (see: http://prev.openstreetmap.fr/blogs/cquest/limites-administratives-simplifiees)

Content

These files contain all the French departments, including the DOM and Mayotte.

For each region, the following attributes are added:

— code_insee: 2-character INSEE code of the department (e.g. 01, 2A)
— name: name of department (e.g. Ain, South Corsica)
— nuts3: European NUTS3 code corresponding to the departure (e.g. FR711, FR831)
— Wikipedia: wikipedia entry (language code followed by article name)
— Wikidata: wikidata ID of the department (from 2016)
— surf_km2: area in km² of the department (from 2018)

Historical

— 20-12-2013: first generation of the file, based on the OSM communal cutting at 19-12-2013
— 06-03-2014: second generation of the file, based on the OSM communal cutting at 06-03-2014
— 18-02-2016: third generation of the file, based on the municipal division OSM at 18-02-2016 taking into account the change between the Loire-Atlantique and Maine-et-Loire following the merger of Le Fresne-sur-Loire (44) with Ingrandes (49)
— 01-01-2017: version based on the municipal division OSM as of 01-01-2017 including the merger of 566 communes into 178 new municipalities (including a commune changing department).
— 01-01-2018: version including mergers of municipalities until 01-01-2018, including the change of department of two merged municipalities modifying the boundaries of Calvados, Manche, Loire-Atlantique and Maine-et-Loire.

Predecent versions available on: http://osm13.openstreetmap.fr/~cquest/openfla/export/

If you have any questions about these exports, you can contact exports@openstreetmap.fr

See also:

— live extraction by API
— cards in SVG format
— contours of the French municipalities
— contours of EPCI 2014
and Contours des EPCI 2013
— contours of the French arrondissements
— contours of French regions