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

[Kevin Kenny]

On Wed, Dec 23, 2020 at 6:00 PM stevea <steveaOSM at softworkers.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

One important thing here - which I mention because the two get confused
regularly - is that an area may be well defined and formally bounded, and a
significant conurbation with a name and local identity, but not have home
rule.  Incorporation as a town or city is not necessary to associate a
place with a well-defined (multi)polygon.

The largest such that I'm personally familiar with is Brentwood, Long
Island, New York, which is in practice a small suburban (in the US sense)
city of about 61,000 inhabitants, but which is legally simply an
unincorporated area of the Town of Islip. It's boundaries are well defined
by exclusion; it is not Bay Shore, nor Deer Park, nor Central Islip, nor
Islip proper - but excluding all of the above gives a simple closed
polygon. Brentwood has its own school district, post office, and railroad
station, and has a fairly well defined 'core' (the commercial area near the
Brentwood train station). There are signs at Brentwood's borders. It's
possible to answer without ambiguity whether a dwelling is or is not in
Brentwood. But there are no articles of incorporation for a village, no
legislative designation for a town, no city charter. No home rule at all:
its only municipal government is the township.

New York has many such; Brentwood merely happens to be the largest.
Occaionally, even two adjacent unincorporated areas will have a
well-defined boundary, usually a road or a natural feature.  Inwood and
Woodmere, for instance, are separated by Mott's Creek. Woodmere and Hewlett
are divided by segments of a half-dozen roads.  These boundaries, too, are
signed and designated.

(Of course, for all of these, I'm pretty sure that there are goofs in the
imported-from-TIGER borders. I'm not down that way enough - particularly in
the Time of the Great Plague - to fix them, though.)
-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin
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