Bangkok, live, block by block Bangkok · live 3D atlas

Who

Dr Non — Bangkok, 1981 →

That’s me. Days old. Siam Square — the most expensive ground in Bangkok today. Back then it was just where our house was. I grew up in the heart of this city and learned it from the inside: heat, floods, skytrain openings, AQI at 200, tax schedules frozen while the market doubled.

I am not going to let anyone fuck up this city. Not the current governors. Not the deputies. Not the committees writing ten-year “smart city” PDFs while the public gets nothing they can use. No apologies. I’m building something — a working twin of the city I was born into. My city. Not theirs.

Thesis

One laptop. Zero politicians who care.

The BKKx Atlas is a thesis statement: a working digital twin of a real city can be built in an afternoon, on one laptop, for the cost of a domain. The data, APIs, and maps are here. What’s missing is a city government with the will to use them.

BMA has been “planning a smart city” since 2016. Ten years. Ten digital strategies. Zero public APIs worth using, zero digital twin for residents. Buildings get taller. Floods get deeper. The public still gets a 1990s PDF. We shipped the whole stack on a one-laptop budget. The hard part is keeping every layer honest and stackable.

My city, not theirs.

How it’s built

Basic infrastructure — still one machine

• Front. Static MapLibre GL atlas in public/ — no SPA framework. Layers, presets, inspect, and this About drawer are plain HTML / CSS / JS.
• Edge. Cloudflare Worker (src/index.ts) on atlas.nonarkara.org: proxies live feeds, serves risk / civic APIs, Range-passthrough for PMTiles from R2.
• Tiles & store. 432,077 OSM buildings as PMTiles on R2; civic amenities in D1 (CIVIC_DB) ingested from BMA / data.go.th.
• Live inputs. iTIC/Longdo traffic + CCTV, RainViewer radar, Open-Meteo wind/heat/AQI, HII/ThaiWater flood gauges — honest about what is live vs schematic.
• Reuse. GeoJSON downloads and /api for Chula, UNL, or anyone building on Bangkok without a consulting fee.

What’s on the map

Shipped — stackable, honest

1. Multi-layer city stack. Buildings under translucent rain, wind, heat, AQI, and flood. Presets: City · Live pulse · Rain now · Flood watch · Satellite air.
2. Inspect + risk API. Click a building → OSM height/type + schematic flood × live PM2.5 via /api/risk.
3. Live traffic + CCTV. iTIC/Longdo expressways and public road cameras (HLS). Not the closed BMA security net. /api/cctv
4. Rail + water transit. Nine rail lines plus four dotted boat corridors and 16 passenger piers. Dots mean scheduled orientation, not pretend-live boats. Ask the multimodal API.
5. Civic open data. Amenities + density by district from BMA / data.go.th via D1 — /api/civic-pois.
6. Land price by district. Real Treasury road-level analysis as a choropleth — not a fake heat paint.
7. Flood sensors + rain radar. HII/ThaiWater gauges and animated RainViewer frames over the silhouette.
8. Current wind field. A 6 × 6 Open-Meteo model grid turns 10 m speed and direction into clickable arrow shafts and heads. It explains where rain and haze may move without pretending to be a street-level sensor network.
9. Night lights / blackout. Desaturated satellite + emissive buildings — pure client paint.

Roadmap

Still one laptop

1. Official flood extents. Swap the schematic envelope for DDPM/BMA GeoJSON when it’s open.
2. Property Tax Verifier (ภาษีที่ดิน) v2. Deed / parcel lookup over Treasury zones vs a typed tax bill.
3. BTS/MRT isochrones. 5 / 10 / 15-minute walksheds from every rail station.
4. Risk API v3. Fold rain intensity + building height into the score.
5. Offline atlas pack. Pin MapLibre + pmtiles + samples onto a USB stick.

Horizon

6. BKKx Digital Twin — handover to BMA. Open-source, no lock-in, no ฿5.4M consulting fee.
7. Property-tech API (full). 432K buildings + cadastral polygons — institutional, not code, is the blocker.
8. Tourist AR · planning sandbox · command center. Same Worker, denser chrome — after the civic layers are boringly reliable.

Data & APIs

For Chula, UNL, anyone building on Bangkok

• Live API catalog JSON · traffic, cctv, risk, flood-sensors, civic-pois
• 16-area curated tour JSON · districts + city-scale “Bangkok from above”
• 126 BTS/MRT/ARL/SRT segments GeoJSON · 9 lines, official colors
• 4,063 canals & rivers GeoJSON · Chao Phraya + khlongs
• 9.3K Rattanakosin buildings GeoJSON · height + base_height
• 1.9K expressway traffic segments GeoJSON · iTIC-compatible sample
• 5 schematic flood envelopes GeoJSON · civic demo · NOT official

Full city extract: python3 scripts/osm-buildings-to-geojson.py with a Bangkok bbox or local PBF. Scripts are the canonical extractors.

Paper

Read the long form

Contact

Use the data. Write him.

Building something on this atlas — research, civic tooling, a classroom demo — email Dr Non. Same for press, partnership, or calling bullshit on a layer that should be more honest.

• nonsmartcity@gmail.com Direct
• nonarkara.org Home
• GitHub · bkk-3d-atlas Source

Credits

Sources that stay cited

Base map & buildings. © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL 1.0) via OpenFreeMap; BKKx PMTiles extract of Bangkok metro footprints. Imagery © Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics.

Live & open civic. iTIC/Longdo (traffic, public CCTV), RainViewer, Open-Meteo (10 m wind / heat / PM2.5), HII/ThaiWater (water levels), BMA / data.go.th / data.bangkok.go.th (schools, sports grounds, car parks, museums, waterway landmarks). Land-price choropleth from Treasury road-level analysis (Home Buyers).

Passenger boats. Maintained service references from Chao Phraya Express Boat, Chao Phraya Tourist Boat and the Thai Government Contact Center’s Khlong Saen Saep record. Corridors and piers are not live vessel positions.

Host. Cloudflare Workers + R2 + D1. Built by Dr Non · BKKx · live at atlas.nonarkara.org.