[talk-au] Classifying settlements (Was Re: Filling in blank space (Was Re: Tagging towns by relative importance, not just population size))

[Andrew Davidson]

On 5/10/23 18:01, cleary wrote:
> the small central district? Or is it the much larger Tamworth LGA? I
> think it would include the suburbs but not the outlying
> towns/villages in the LGA. There are also city/suburbs such as "City
> of Ryde" which is the name of a local government area in the Sydney
> metropolitan area but the actuality is that, for all practical
> purposes, Ryde is a suburb of Sydney.

The ABS has population stats at different geographical levels. For 
Tamworth we have LGA:

Tamworth Regional: 63,070

This would be the population you would put on the admin_level 6 
boundary. From the suburb and localities you get:

Tamworth: 189

This would be the population that would go on the admin_level 9 
boundary. From the urban centres and localities you get:

Tamworth: 35,415

This is the population of the settlement, which I have been adding to 
the place node. The UCL is the ABS's attempt to answer the question 
"what is the population of ....?"

> 
> Leaving aside cities and suburbs, our discussion has mainly been
> about non-city rural areas. While  there may be some fuzziness around
> the population of the business and residential districts of a
> settlement and whether the population in its surrounding areas should
> be counted, I would support population numbers as a reasonably
> objective and useful determinant of town/village/hamlet status.

How to subdivide an urban settlement into subdivisions is another set of 
problems.

I would prefer a system based on just population, but I got the feeling 
that we wouldn't get agreement on that, as we have mappers who want to 
adjust.