This project extracts and processes suburb and locality data from an official LINZ shapefile and outputs a clean, deduplicated CSV file (data/suburbs_nz.csv) containing the following information:
- UUID
- LINZ ID
- Suburb/Locality name
- Additional name
- Type (Suburb or Locality)
- Territorial authority
- Parent name and type
- Latitude and Longitude (in WGS84)
This is designed for integration into community platforms, location databases, or applications needing accurate NZ suburb/locality geodata.
You can run this script using podman (or docker) with the following one-liner:
podman run --rm \
--network host \
-v "$(pwd)":/app:Z \
-w /app/src \
node:20 \
bash -c "npm install proj4 shapefile @turf/centroid && node build_suburbs_datafile_from_linz.js"This will:
- Download any missing dependencies
- Read the shapefile from
data/suburbs-nz/nz-suburbs-and-localities.shp - Generate (or update) the
data/suburbs_nz.csvfile
The script ensures UUIDs for LINZ IDs are consistent between runs. It re-generates only for newly discovered IDs.
The resulting file is:
👉 data/suburbs_nz.csv ← click here to download
This work is based on open government data:
- Source: NZ Suburbs and Localities
- Published by: LINZ (Land Information New Zealand)
- License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Please include attribution to LINZ when using the data in derived products:
Contains data sourced from Land Information New Zealand and licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.
- Node.js (ESM format)
shapefile– reads the shapefile binary@turf/centroid– calculates geometric centroidsproj4– reprojects NZTM2000 to WGS84
Contributions and improvements welcome. Just open a PR or issue on GitHub.
All code is MIT licensed. Data is CC BY 4.0 as outlined above.