[Talk-GB] UK cities

[Ed Avis]

Another way of looking at this is that it comes from tagging a 'place
node' rather than mapping cities as areas.  Individual nodes for
counties have been phased out in favour of exact boundaries and the
same could happen for towns and cities.  If you map an area, that
forces the choice of whether your object is intended to represent the
City of London, or Greater London, or whatever.

Of course, once you have local authority boundaries you also have city
boundaries, they just need to be tagged somehow as 'this local
authority is for a city'.

So in the long term the answer may be to stop rendering and address
lookup and other applications from using the place=city nodes at all,
but have them work based on areas.  Then the ambiguous place nodes can
eventually disappear.

Since that isn't going to happen any time soon, I suggest leaving the
current somewhat fuzzy definition of place=city as it is, and adding
more tightly-defined tags such as 'designated city status' or
population if they are wanted.

--
Ed Avis <eda at waniasset.com>