Where can I find all cities, regions and cantons of Switzerland?

Question

I am interested in finding all cities, regions and cantons of Switzerland. Where can I find them?

Answer 1

For detailed statistics, bfs.admin.ch is the official Swiss source of population stats and data. They have many English-language resources, but the one you are looking for is in German or French only. Excel files are easy to understand without speaking German or French.

The source page is here and the Excel file is here. It is called "Bilanz der ständigen Wohnbevölkerung nach Bezirken und Gemeinden" or "Bilan de la population résidante permanente selon les districts et les communes".

The Excel file has the structure as follows 1. Kanton/Canton (i.e. Zurich), 2. Bezirk/District/Distretto (i.e. Affoltern), 3. Municipality/Gemeinde/Commune (i.e. Aeugst am Albis). Note that the municipality code is not the PLZ.

- Zürich
>> Bezirk Affoltern
......0001 Aeugst am Albis
......0002 Affoltern am Albis
......0003 Bonstetten
......0004 Hausen am Albis
......removed for clarity
......0014 Wettswil am Albis
>> Bezirk Andelfingen
......0021 Adlikon
......0022 Benken (ZH)

For basic lists of municipalities (cities) and their PLZ (zip code) and Canton (two-letter code), you can use the resources from post.ch. See the download link here and this particular file here. They also have a list of municipalities by PLZ and municipality number.

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If you are looking for mapping data, the government swisstopo site offers tons of data. There is a GitHub repo called swiss-maps where you can find tools to create geoJSON and topoJSON files based on the swisstopo data.

Answer 2

The experimental open data portal of the Swiss administration contains data sets of municipalities and associated postal codes, among many others:

http://www.opendata.admin.ch/en/dataset/ch-swisstopo-vd-ortschaftenverzeichnis_plz

http://data.geo.admin.ch.s3.amazonaws.com/ch.swisstopo-vd.ortschaftenverzeichnis_plz/PLZO_CSV_LV03.zip

This seems to be open data in the true sense.

Answer 3

We use this kind of data a lot at the company I work, so we created Github repository that provides municipalities, districts and cantons by year (as JSON):

https://github.com/seantis/swiss-municipalities

Answer 4

Below is a link to a CSV file I generated for Switzerland from the US NGA GNS Server. It contains all geographic features from their database, including the 26 cantons (AMD1) and incorporated places (PPL).

http://www.opengeocode.org/cude1.1/NGA/GNS/SZ.zip

Explanation of the field naming and type conventions for our linked CSV format is here:

http://www.opengeocode.org/cude1.1/LinkedCSV-Vocab.php

The GNS DSG column is where you can identify the feature type:
ADM1 : Cantons
ADM2 : Districts, Prefectures
PPL : Populated Places

The FX column will identity the type of administrative division (e.g., district vs. prefecture).

Many of the features have multiple entries, one per official language where the name of the feature differs on the language (column lang). Entries for the same feature will have the same UFI value.

I have also been maintaining the NGA GEC (formerly FIPS 10-4) Excel spreadsheet (original format) for 1st level administrative divisions of countries. The spreadsheet is currently updated to Update 15 (March 2014). You can find the BGN approved short names and administrative division names for Switzerland as an additional resource:

http://www.opengeocode.org/archive.php