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Analysing the present · Amenity & accessibility mapping

Reading a city's fabric around a new landmark

An amenity-and-walkability portrait of central Yerevan: 3,146 points of interest classified, mapped, and turned into density surfaces to read the urban fabric the World Trade Center Yerevan would join.

The amenity fabric of central Yerevan: every point of interest around the site, coloured by category, over the city's buildings and its garden-city ring.

The amenity fabric of central Yerevan: every point of interest around the site, coloured by category, over the city's buildings and its garden-city ring.

01The idea

When SOM masterplanned the World Trade Center Yerevan, ORG took on the site and city analysis: the read of the neighbourhood a new landmark would land in. Yerevan was laid out a century ago on a garden-city plan, and the brief was to understand what the modern fabric around the site actually offers today: what amenities are nearby, how densely they cluster, and what a person can reach on foot. I built that portrait entirely from open geospatial data.

02What I built

I pulled every point of interest around the site from OpenStreetMap and Overture (extracted March 2025) and classified 3,146 amenities into 17 categories: food and beverage, retail, healthcare, culture, transport, and more. From that base:

  • Per-category density surfaces: a Gaussian-KDE "heat map" for each amenity type, showing where it concentrates.
  • Amenity density per building: how much of each category sits within a short walk of any given location.
  • A walking-accessibility read of what the site itself reaches on foot.
  • A competition analysis counting like-for-like amenities in concentric 250–1,000 m rings.

All of it in open-source Python: GeoPandas, SciPy and rasterio.

The amenity mix of central Yerevan: 3,146 points of interest by category. Food and beverage and retail dominate the fabric around the site.

The amenity mix of central Yerevan: 3,146 points of interest by category. Food and beverage and retail dominate the fabric around the site.

03What it shows

Food and beverage (844) and retail (779) dominate the fabric, but the more useful finding is where each type lives. The density surfaces show that every category clusters differently, and cutting them by theme reveals distinct urban structures: higher education and tech services scattered in pockets across the centre, while design, culture, and retail concentrate hard along the main commercial spines.

The same method cut by theme: higher education and tech services (left) against design, culture, and retail (right). Each concentrates in a different part of the city.

The same method cut by theme: higher education and tech services (left) against design, culture, and retail (right). Each concentrates in a different part of the city.

Accessibility ties it together. From the site, a large share of the city's key destinations (tech, culture, education, health, nature) sit within a short walk or drive, which is what lets the analysis speak to how the new landmark would connect into the existing city.

What the site reaches: walking and driving connections from the World Trade Center site out to Yerevan's key districts and destinations.

What the site reaches: walking and driving connections from the World Trade Center site out to Yerevan's key districts and destinations.

It is a compact, repeatable way to characterise an urban site from open data alone: the evidence layer beneath a masterplan's first moves.

3,146
points of interest classified & mapped
17
amenity categories across the study area
844
food & beverage venues, the densest layer
10
per-category density surfaces modelled (KDE)
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