[Tagging] Fuzzy areas again: should we have them or not?

[stevea]

On Dec 23, 2020, at 2:41 PM, Graeme Fitzpatrick <graemefitz1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Do those people think they live in this town?

and

> My own city is a major built-up area, but as you go out into the surrounding country, you come to suburbs with acre / <hectare house blocks, then a bit further there are multi acre / hectare blocks, but where does the "city" end?

In my neck of the woods (California, USA), especially with what are known as "incorporated municipalities" (a city or town as a "body politic" as a distinct, limited entity), there are ALWAYS boundaries around these:  you are either in or out.  Again — and this is how it is in the USA (though I suspect something similar happens in the rest of the world) — such formalized cities / towns are distinct from "unincorporated areas" like villages, hamlets and smaller which are not "really" cities or towns (they are not incorporated under the laws of the state as an incorporated, charted... "city"), but are large enough to aggregate as a conurbation substantial enough so that the people who live there agree they are all members of a common "community."  These are usually under 10,000 inhabitants, often under 3,000 or even 1,000, but 1,000 people, collected together in close proximity, are something humanity recognizes as a "something."  Terminology varies, but the basic concept doesn't.

So, if the "town" (or city) is "formally established" (incorporated, chartered...under the laws of the state / "next level up in the political hierarchy" it is in), somebody CAN determine whether or not they live "in" this town (or city).

These are fairly loose-as-to-the-specifics all around the world, but I think pretty much everywhere in the world has a way to declare a town or city as something the state recognizes as "a real, established (in law) conurbation."

There are things which are NOT these things (villages, hamlets, isolated dwellings, quarters, neighborhoods, census tracts, voting districts, postal delivery areas...) and which OSM has had to take great care to both unravel and well-document so that we properly tag and don't confuse these.  This has had some mixed results, as there was a lot of rubber burned on the road to get where we are now, but at least in the USA and how we now tag here (our United States admin_level and United States/Boundaries wiki are good, complement-one-another documents to describe this) these are much better established.  Well, now.  Before about 2015, it was messy.  Now, it's much better.  I think it has gotten better in OSM in other countries, too.

SteveA