Search an address or click the map, and MapToNap draws every building footprint inside your radius in solid black, leaving streets, squares and courtyards white. It is the classic figure–ground drawing (Schwarzplan in German), made from live OpenStreetMap data instead of hours of tracing.
Footprints are OpenStreetMap building outlines fetched when you generate, so the grain, block sizes and gaps are those of the real place.
Streets, squares, courtyards and parks stay white. That is what makes a figure–ground useful: the shape of public space becomes the subject of the drawing.
Choose a colour scheme and a round or square frame, then export an SVG to restyle in Illustrator, Affinity or Inkscape, a vector PDF for boards, or a PNG.
Each plate was generated in MapToNap at a 1 km radius. Open one to see the street network, land use and green & water drawings of the same site.
All 24 city figure ground plans →
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence. The drawings are MapToNap output, shown as flattened previews.
Search an address or click anywhere on the map. The radius runs from 200 m for a single block to 3 km for a whole district.
Urban Fabric is MapToNap’s figure–ground drawing. It is included in the free version.
Adjust the style, then export SVG, PDF or PNG for your board, portfolio or competition panel.
A plan that shows buildings as solid, usually black, and all unbuilt space as white. Leaving out names, colours and topography makes the urban grain, the block size and the shape of public space easy to read and to compare between places. In German it is called a Schwarzplan.
Giambattista Nolli’s 1748 plan of Rome is the famous ancestor of the figure–ground, and it also showed the interiors of churches and public buildings as open space. MapToNap draws footprints from OpenStreetMap, so those interiors stay solid. For a true Nolli reading, export the SVG and cut them out by hand.
Yes. Urban Fabric is one of the four analyses in the free version, together with Roads & Streets, Functional Areas and Green & Water. Free exports carry a MapToNap watermark; Pro removes it and unlocks the rest of the 2D site analysis set.
There is no direct DXF export for site diagrams. Export the SVG and convert it to DXF in Illustrator or Inkscape, or place the vector PDF in your layout software.
It is as complete as OpenStreetMap is in that place. Coverage is excellent in most European city centres and good in many cities worldwide, but patchy in others, including parts of China and many smaller towns. Check against an aerial photo before relying on it. If there is no data at all, the drawing is labelled SCHEMATIC instead of being filled with invented geometry.
Any radius from 200 m to 3 km around the point you pick. Around 500 m suits a single urban block and its neighbours; 1 to 2 km shows the structure of a whole district.