[Tagging] place=neighbourhood vs landuse=residential

[Kevin Kenny]

On Thu, May 8, 2025 at 12:02 PM Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdreist at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> sent from a phone
>
> On 8 May 2025, at 02:29, Andrew Welch via Tagging <
> tagging at openstreetmap.org> wrote:
>
> To add to this, you can also do a boundary relation with boundary=place to
> map the area if it's clearly defined as well.
>
>
>
> you can do it, but admittedly it is not very common yet, 10,600 such tags,
> vs. 1.4 million place on ways. A data consumer can understand whether a
> place is mapped as a node or as an area or both, so generally it may not be
> technically required (particularly if we think that place boundaries can
> overlap and the same area can be part of several places, unlike with
> administrative boundaries). Sometimes it could make sense to also specify a
> centre and then a relation would be really useful.
>
> Here‘s an example for a simple place relation without a node:
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/5451764#map=14/41.95122/12.39640
> someone also grouped all these in a collection ;-)
>

I think we may have different mental models of the land use patterns.

With US urban planning, such as it is (and it's horrible for a number of
reasons that I won't get into here), it's common to have a neighbourhood
that's virtually exclusively residential (there may be some small areas
dedicated to infrastructure; perhaps a power substation or a drainage
basin).  These often have only a few streets entering and leaving, with a
complex street pattern within. The boundaries are obvious to infer, because
the entrances and exits are so few.

Typically, they were named and planned by a developer. Often, they are
signed at the entrances, with signs placed by the developers when the
houses were originally built and sold, but never removed. They don't have
any formal administrative existence beyond possibly a homeowners'
association.  (HOA's tend to become private zoning boards with
quasi-governmental powers, but that's another irrelevant rant.)

If someone asks what town I live in, I'll answer, 'Niskayuna.' (
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/175479).  If someone follows up with
"Oh, really? Where?"  I'll answer "Orchard Park" (
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6495605) and the locals will know
what I mean.  It doesn't exist as an administrative entity, so
`boundary=administrative` doesn't really fit.  It's arguable that it ought
to have a place node, although it doesn't really have a 'cultural center'
to associate it with; some arbitrary point toward the middle of the tract
is the best you could do.  But it does have a known boundary, and that
boundary is intimately related to the landuse. So it seemed natural simply
to hang the name on the 'landuse' multipolygon. (Clipping out the enclosed
patches of wetland and woodland was a later refinement - I started by
rough-mapping the area and then added detail.)

'Mohawk Trails', 'Windsor Estates', 'Old Niskayuna' and so on are distinct
'landuse=residential' polygons; they, too, are named areas with locally
understood (but administratively insignificant) boundaries.  I haven't
tagged any of these boundaries with `place` because of a local
understanding that `place`s should be only on nodes.

(Feel free to stop reading here.  The rest is a general screed on mapping
philosophy, with the gist being that the question that "if these things
aren't administrative regions with definite boundaries, then what do the
signs mark?" has no non-controversial answer in OSM.)

We have other sorts of named areas in the US that are controversial - for
instance, areas corresponding to formal municipalities that have
disincorporated - but still have recognized and signed boundaries. (All the
communities in Queens County, New York, for instance!)  There are voices
that insist these can be nothing but `boundary=census` - but the reason
that they exist as census areas is that the Census Bureau respects the
local understanding of the boundaries.  Many of these, particularly in the
counties surrounding New York City, continue to have their names signed,
are identified as regions by the planning boards of whatever administrative
entity (usually a Town - the equivalent of a 'township' in many other
states), have post offices named for them, and have residents that continue
to identify the name of the community with the disbanded government as
their "home town".

New York in particular is infamous among US mappers for having
administrative boundaries that are not hierarchical - cities that cross
county lines, villages in two or three townships, towns and cities of the
same name (where the chartered city is an enclave cut out of the township,
and so on.  Some of our administrative boundaries are indefinite - but
we've added the indefinite parts roughly to OSM anyway, because many things
break down if the topology is wrong. Indeed, I'd be surprised if your
assertion that 'administrative regions do not intersect' isn't violated
somewhere. I certainly know of a couple of cases where it was discovered
that the metes and bounds of two counties differed
by hundreds of metres in the statutes establishing them.

In general, we may also have a philosophical difference on the two sides of
the ocean.

The situation on the ground in the US is messier than the typical European
can imagine.  We US mappers do the best with what we have.  We're stretched
thin - we are often mapping thinly populated areas, where there aren't
enough people, to say nothing of enough mappers, to do what you'd consider
a minimally proper job. But we're not willing to accept an all-or-nothing
attitude that I sometimes see on this list. A rough map is better than no
map.  If we have a municipality with named and signed administrative
subdivisions without home rule, that's what we map.  If we have named and
signed neighbourhoods with easily inferred boundaries, even if they have no
administrative existence whatever, that's what we map.  If the Census
Bureau has decent polygons identifying those boundaries among its public
domain data, we may well bring those in as a starting point. (They're
woefully inaccurate, so we try to fix them as we get around to it.  But
there aren't enough of us.)

I'd rather have a map that I can use for rough navigation over my whole
county (or larger local area) than have a few city blocks that are perfect.
I don't have the time to do both.

The real North America is messy and inconsistent. Europe has been urbanized
and enclosed for a couple of thousand years longer than the US and has had
a lot more time to tidy up the messes in the field - making it much easier
to keep them neat on the map.



-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin
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