[Tagging] Shop vs amenity

John Willis johnw at mac.com
Fri Aug 28 00:37:24 UTC 2015


When I think "class", you think "specific" and vice versa. We are very often ying and yang! 

There are so, so, so many single retail buildings where one store has a few tiny kiosks inside (without being a mall) - almost every supermarket I know in the US has an (independent) bank, a starbucks, a dry cleaner, or some other sub-leased little spot. Near the front to serve customers. 

We don't have "building=drop_forge" and building=paint_booth for industrial, yet those are specialty building types - because the the absolute myriad of mixes and matches that occur. Retail buildings more often than not cannot be grouped into sets by built usage, like an office building, house, or apartment building could. 

Defining a building by a particular amenity alone doesn't sound very good when the building and function are so easily separated, and easily separated from its parent landuse=* (a shop in a college, a gift shop at a temple, a 7-11 in a hotel, etc) 

If you really want to define retail buildings *as buildings* - then you need to define them by their built types: single_shop, strip_mall, shopping_Centre, shopping_centre_anchor, urban_mixed, rural_mixed, indoor_mall, mall_anchor, mall_outlier, outdoor_mall, warehouse, big-box, etc. a market could be in any one of those depending on the region or country. 

There are guidelines for naming mall types as well http://www.icsc.org/research/references/c-shopping-center-definitions

Imo, using building=to define shop type is the same as using building=to define office company type. Can you tell by looking - without logo - if it is the HQ of a bank, a law firm, a school district, or a bunch of disparate tenants? I don't think so.

I want some generic classes of buildings to denote general purpose. 
I want the same landuses to denote general purpose as well, because so often a building or a an amenity type is an outlier to the general landuse (most city halls have a convenience store for selling government stamps in Japan), so you can at least get an idea of class and render class of building and landuse differently, and then slap on the icon of whatever shop= office= or amenity= on tag has been added to the area, building, or point on top of it all.  

I should be able to zoom out to where there are no icons -  and see retail, commercial, industrial, residential, civic-government, and specialty  (school, hospital, park, etc) buildings and *landuses* rendered differently and instantly understand the layout of a city without a single label,shield, or icon. 

And the basis for that is a complete set of landuse and complimentary building tags. 

Javbw

> On Aug 28, 2015, at 8:21 AM, Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdreist at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> sent from a phone
> 
>> Am 28.08.2015 um 00:20 schrieb John Willis <johnw at mac.com>:
>> 
>> Interestingly, most electronics shops are "on stilts" - first floor is parking, second floor is is the main floor. In Tokyo, everything is crammed into the bottom floors of multi-story buildings, with the supermarkets in the basements of large buildings or malls
> 
> 
> I would bet both of them could be described with distinctive building types. It's pointless to call them building=retail because you can already see it from the building user (shop tag) that it's a retail building.
> 
> 
> cheers 
> Martin 
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