Map viewer

Select a city, click on a map location, pick a topic, and see how your location compares to its surroundings.

This interactive map viewer lets you explore the areas around Bulgaria’s five largest cities through several key environmental factors. These indicators reflect both harmful and health-supporting aspects of the urban environment, including traffic-related air pollution, road traffic noise, walkability, and proximity to urban green spaces.

Environmental factors are shown as a grid, where each square represents an area of 250 m × 250 m. The colour scale illustrates how values vary across space: darker shades indicate higher values, while lighter shades indicate lower values.

You can zoom in to specific locations to view the average value for each area, or search for an address as you would in other mapping applications. The map also allows you to explore how a selected factor is distributed across a city, or to compare one neighbourhood with other parts of the city.

Here are more details about the maps.

• Walkability is a composite index that reflects how easy an area is for walking. Highly walkable neighbourhoods are typically compact and have well-connected street networks and good access to services and amenities. These characteristics encourage walking and cycling, supporting more sustainable everyday travel choices.

• The indicator for distance to urban greenspace refers to the proximity of green areas of at least 2 hectares, allowing you to assess how easily a park or similarly large green space can be reached from a given location. Access to such spaces is associated with opportunities to support health and well-being by enabling relaxation and recovery from physical, psychological, and emotional fatigue and stress, facilitating social interaction, providing relief from traffic and noise, and encouraging physical activity. The World Health Organization generally recommends that everyone should have access to a green space of this size within approximately 300 m of their home.

These maps were developed by the research team using field measurements, remote sensing analysis of the Earth’s surface based on satellite imagery, or a combination thereof. They are designed to support awareness and provide an overall picture of how environmental factors are distributed within urban areas. They are not intended to serve as the sole basis for regulatory decisions, policy development, or choosing a place of residence.

For more information on how the maps were created, please refer to the dedicated section available on the Articles and Downloads pages of this website.