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

[Martin Søndergaard]

It wasn't my intention with my comments to change or limit the overall
discussion of "fuzzy features" to a discussion on "how do we define a town
or city?".
So I want to try and redirect focus back to my main point:
*Fuzzy features (both areas and nodes and both natural and human made)
already exist in abundance within OSM. *

To be overly dramatic; the "purists" have already lost the war. For now it
has just kind of been ignored or there have been smaller "battles" for
example with the natural=bay tag. And the natural=bay tag still exists and
doesn't seem to go anywhere. Fuzzy features seem to be here to stay. There
is just no way for us to tag them as such.

On Thu, 24 Dec 2020 at 10:57, Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdreist at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I would think these are 2 different kinds of things. "incorporated
> municipalities" seems to be administrative entities. This is what we map as
> boundary=administrative, admin_level=* and it can (depending on the
> situation and surely varying a lot across the world) contain a lot of land
> that you would not consider to be part of a settlement (e.g. fields,
> forests, meadows, lakes, wetlands, etc.).
> Opposed to this, there is "place=city/town/village/hamlet" which is about
> settlements, and I would not expect a place to contain fields and forests
> (maybe exceptionally it can be possible, like "parks" will be part of a
> settlement and can contain fields and forests, parks as in leisure=park).
>

I agree with your distinction between administrative entities and the
actual place.

But I can also say that in Denmark many, if not most, hamlets in Denmark
consist of or grew from a small group farms located close to each other.
This means that these hamlets often have small areas or strips of meadow or
farmland in between them.
A good example of this is: https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/2599886253

/Martin Søndergaard
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