OSMnx: Retrieve building polygon for multiple cities

Question

I am new to osm. Currently I am trying to retrieve multiple cities' building polygon using osmnx package in python.

Code:

place = "Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia"
graph = ox.footprints.footprints_from_place(place, footprint_type='building')

graph.head()

It works fine.

However, if I want to get another state, it returns an error.

(also the same result if I want to retrieve it at country level - in this case - place = "Malaysia")

place = "Selangor, Malaysia"
graph = ox.footprints.footprints_from_place(place, footprint_type='building')

graph.head()

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
ValueError                                Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-20-9e3439b6fc4c> in <module>()
      1 place = "Selangor, Malaysia"
----> 2 graph = ox.footprints.footprints_from_place(place, footprint_type='building')
      3 
      4 graph.head()

5 frames
/usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/shapely/geometry/multipolygon.py in geos_multipolygon_from_polygons(arg)
    175     # no implicit flattening.
    176     if isinstance(obs[0], MultiPolygon):
--> 177         raise ValueError("Sequences of multi-polygons are not valid arguments")
    178 
    179     exemplar = obs[0]

ValueError: Sequences of multi-polygons are not valid arguments

Can someone help me? Thanks

Answer 1

It looks like OSMnx's footprints module is not correctly handling or disregarding a complex (and possibly invalid?) multipolygon geometry. Note that efforts are underway to replace the footprints and pois modules with a more powerful, robust, generalizable geometries module. In the meantime, I believe you can accomplish your goal with the pois module like this:

import osmnx as ox
ox.config(use_cache=True, log_console=True)
place = 'Selangor, Malaysia'
gdf = ox.pois_from_place(place, tags={'building': True})
gdf.shape  # (47516, 390)