About the Colouring Bahrain Project

Colouring Bahrain is a free knowledge exchange platform, designed to collate, generate, visualise, open spatial data on every building across Muharraq and potentially other cities. It also releases open platform code to enable its design to be easily reproduced.

If you live in, research, design, build, manage, or care for Bahrain's buildings—or have a professional or academic interest in the built environment—this platform has been developed to enable you to share your expertise and contribute to enhancing the city's sustainability. We invite contributions from academia, government, and industry to support the development of accurate, informative, and visually compelling maps that represent the city's buildings. Colouring Bahrain is part of the international Colouring Cities Research Programme. The development is led by the Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities, responsible for preserving urban heritage and historical areas.

Why do we need Colouring Bahrain?

The building stock forms the core of a city's physical and cultural fabric and represents one of society's most valuable and enduring resources. In historic cities such as those found across Bahrain, buildings and streets are not only functional assets but also carriers of collective memory, identity, and heritage value. The quality, condition, and management of these buildings—particularly residential structures, which make up the majority of the stock—have a direct impact on quality of life, cultural continuity, and urban character. However, geospatial and attribute data on buildings, which are essential for understanding, managing, and safeguarding historic urban areas, remain fragmented and difficult to access in Bahrain, as in many other countries.

Bahrain's urban landscape reflects multiple layers of development, from traditional architecture to post-oil modern expansion. Managing this diverse building stock presents significant challenges, particularly in historic cities where pressures for redevelopment, densification, and infrastructure upgrades can place heritage assets at risk. Effective decision-making requires detailed knowledge of building age, construction type, use, condition, and heritage status, yet such information is rarely available in an integrated or openly accessible form.

In recent years, Bahrain has shown increasing interest in smart city approaches as a means of improving urban management, service delivery, and planning efficiency. Smart city initiatives rely on accurate, up-to-date, and spatially linked data, including data on buildings and the public realm. For historic cities, this creates an opportunity to combine digital innovation with heritage-sensitive planning, supporting evidence-based conservation, targeted retrofit, and informed development control.

Tracking change within the building stock—such as refurbishment, adaptation, demolition, and changes of use—is particularly important in historic areas, where incremental transformation can cumulatively erode cultural significance. Systematic data on these processes would support better monitoring of historic urban landscapes, help prioritise conservation efforts, and enable more balanced negotiations between preservation and growth.

This context has generated a growing demand among researchers, heritage professionals, planners, and policymakers for detailed, accessible building data to support analysis, monitoring, and urban modelling. While some countries have begun to release large-scale building attribute datasets, access to such information in Bahrain remains limited, including for academic and public-interest research.

Colouring Bahrain, as part of the Colouring Cities Research Programme, has been established in response to these challenges. It proposes a new model of open knowledge exchange centred on an open, collaborative database designed to document and visualise building attributes relevant to cities, including age, form, use, and heritage significance. Supported by open-source platform code, the initiative enables replication and adaptation across different national contexts. The overarching aim of Colouring Bahrain and the Colouring Cities Research Programme is to support more informed, transparent, and inclusive management of cities, in alignment with the United Nations' 2016 New Urban Agenda and its emphasis on culturally sensitive, resilient, and well-managed urban development.

What are we collecting?

Our platform collects data on the physical form, quality and performance of Bahrain's buildings, as well as their lifespans and history. This includes temporal data on building age, architectural typology, construction materials, and their planning context. Over the coming years, and with the support of partners and contributors, our goal is to provide free, spatially enabled statistics on the location, use, age, size, street context, designers and builders, planning and heritage status, adaptability, repairability, and site history of buildings across Bahrain.

How are we collecting data?

We are currently evaluating multiple methods of data capture, including the bulk upload of existing surveyed datasets, building-level crowdsourcing, automated approaches (such as deriving building characteristics from available datasets, including age and height), and the integration of continuously updated data sources, particularly in relation to planning information. Data ethics—encompassing considerations of privacy, potential misuse, and responsible application—as well as data accuracy, constitute key areas of ongoing research.