[Tagging] Buildings mixing residential and commercial use

Martin Koppenhoefer dieterdreist at gmail.com
Mon Aug 31 19:37:28 UTC 2015



sent from a phone

> Am 31.08.2015 um 14:17 schrieb Tod Fitch <tod at fitchdesign.com>:
> 
> Completed, the look of the buildings is pretty recognizable from the street with the fairly tall retail floor below and shorter floors of obvious residential above. I guess it could be confused with a badly designed urban hotel, but it sure would not be confused with an office building or traditional apartment building.
> 
> So building=apartments obviously is not accurate. Nor is building=retail.


I agree. There clearly are typologies with retail (and offices) in the ground floor and residential (or offices) in the upper floors, indeed this is typical for (e.g.) the "European City" for hundreds of years (it was already predominant in the middle ages for towns). 

The separation of living and working came up only recently in the 20th century (for innerurban / central areas) and is mostly outdated from an urbanist point of view because of the problems it creates. This is also a discussion of life style and ideology of course and purely residential or commercial areas still get developed in many areas. 

There is kind of an agreement that industrial scale use and those businesses that create noise and smell should be kept away from living areas, but in practice you can find even those (e.g. poor areas of the world, or from another perspective you could also see pubs, restaurants or bars as counter examples in many cases).

From a practical point of view, businesses and dedicated business parts of a building are easily recognizable (store front, signage, typically individual entrances, ...). 

Maybe we should use the building type tag on floors? This way we would become more flexible. Just an idea (puts values in the key), one object:
building:level(-1)=supermarket 
building:level(0-6)=commercial 

or different objects:
A
building:part=supermarket 
level=-1

B
building:part=office_block
level=0-6 


cheers,
Martin 


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