How to Find Which City, District, or Neighbourhood Contains a Location

Find which administrative area contains a location

You have latitude and longitude and need the city, district, neighbourhood, or another named area that contains that point. The Boundaries API part-of endpoint returns matching boundaries from smaller local areas through larger administrative regions.

Task flow: latitude and longitude → Boundaries API → containing boundary features → selected city, district, or neighbourhood.

This differs from reverse geocoding: reverse geocoding finds a nearby address or place, while part-of returns boundary features whose areas contain the input location.

Find containing boundaries

Request administrative, place, and neighbourhood-related boundaries for a point in central Berlin. The query uses separate latitude and longitude parameters.

https://api.geoapify.com/v1/boundaries/part-of?lat=52.52&lon=13.405&boundaries=administrative,place,neighborhood&geometry=point&lang=en&apiKey=YOUR_API_KEY

boundaries is a comma-separated list with up to ten values. The neighborhood filter uses this spelling in the request, while structured response fields can use neighbourhood.

geometry=point returns a representative point and is sufficient when you only need names and identifiers. Request geometry_1000, geometry_5000, or geometry_10000 when you also need simplified boundary polygons; the number is the geometry accuracy in meters.

Reduced response: The full result contains additional datasource, name, and attribution fields.

{
  "type": "FeatureCollection",
  "features": [
    {
      "properties": {
        "name": "Mitte",
        "city": "Berlin",
        "district": "Mitte",
        "suburb": "Mitte",
        "formatted": "Mitte, Berlin, Germany",
        "categories": [
          "administrative",
          "administrative.neighbourhood_level"
        ],
        "place_id": "51a2805a941fcd2a4059e839774dd9424a40f00101f901b6400000000000009203054d69747465"
      }
    },
    {
      "properties": {
        "name": "Mitte",
        "city": "Berlin",
        "district": "Mitte",
        "formatted": "Berlin, Mitte, Germany",
        "categories": [
          "administrative",
          "administrative.suburb_level"
        ],
        "place_id": "515816571b42b82a4059f6b4288f49444a40f00101f901db3f000000000000c002059203054d69747465"
      }
    },
    {
      "properties": {
        "name": "Berlin",
        "city": "Berlin",
        "state": "Berlin",
        "formatted": "Berlin, Germany",
        "categories": [
          "administrative",
          "administrative.country_part_level"
        ]
      }
    }
  ]
}

Select the boundary level you need

A point can belong to several overlapping boundaries, and administrative systems differ by country. Do not assume that the first feature is always a city or that every result has a district or neighbourhood field.

Choose a feature using both its structured fields and categories:

When several features have the same name, their categories, structured fields, and place_id distinguish the underlying boundary levels. Preserve the complete selected feature rather than storing only its display name.

Use lang for localized names where available, but keep a fallback because not every boundary has a name in every language. Also retain datasource attribution from the full API response when displaying or redistributing the data.