A city you can read like a game map.

Pixel Sydney draws inner Sydney as an isometric pixel world — every building extruded from real footprints, every street with its real lane markings, and every business sitting inside the building it actually occupies. No aerial photos, no generic pins: a hand-built map engine renders the city the way a strategy game would.

Isometric map of the Sydney CBD

The city, counted

4,709buildings drawn in 3D3,117businesses on the map14suburbs covered

What's on the map

The coverage is built around where the buildings and the businesses actually are — the dense inner city, not a council boundary. That means the CBD's towers and Barangaroo, Pyrmont, the terrace streets of Surry Hills, Darlinghurst and Paddington, Newtown, Glebe and Balmain, Redfern and Marrickville, Potts Point, North Sydney across the bridge, and out east to Bondi Junction, Bondi Beach and Coogee. The same engine that places every cafe in its building draws the city's other layers too — transport, parks, playgrounds, public toilets, EV chargers and more. Flick the layers on the live map.

Built from open data, openly

Everything on the map has a public, checkable source — and each card says where its facts came from and when they were last synced.

🗺️ OpenStreetMap
Building footprints, streets, parks, the harbour, and the businesses themselves — maintained by thousands of local mappers (ODbL).
🏛️ Australian Business Register
ABNs and legal entities matched to listings — the “Registered business” badge comes straight from government registers.
📮 G-NAF
Australia's geocoded address file keeps our suburbs and postcodes honest.
🌐 Wikidata
Official websites for national chains, so even franchise branches link somewhere useful.
📊 ABS Census 2021
Population, median age and rents for suburb profiles.

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence.

Why isometric?

Because cities are three-dimensional, and lists aren't. On Pixel Sydney a fourteen-storey tower full of businesses looks like a fourteen-storey tower — the ×N badge tells you how much is inside, and one click opens the whole building. Cafes cluster where they actually cluster. The map is the interface.

Who builds this

Pixel Sydney is built by Grigory Frolov — a web developer and digital marketing specialist with twenty years behind the keyboard, writing about the city on the blog the way the map sees it. Questions or ideas? Get in touch.

Run a Sydney business?

Your business is very likely already on the map. Claiming it is free and takes about a minute: click the verification link we email to your business's publicly listed address, or add our badge to your website — no passwords, no forms either way. Verified owners get the green badge, a photo gallery, opening hours, links, and priority placement across the site.

Claim your business — free

Spotted something wrong?

Every listing has a “Spotted an error?” link — corrections go to a human moderator, and fixes flow back through the open datasets so everyone benefits, not just this site. For anything else: send us a message.