[Talk-GB] UK cities

[Tom Hughes]

On 17/10/11 14:26, Ed Avis wrote:

> 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.

The problem with that approach is that concepts like "town" and "city" 
do not have well defined boundaries in the UK.

> 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'.

This is untrue, as it assumes that what people view as a "town" has 
boundaries which match a particular local authority.

Many towns have no such authority, and in other cases there is an 
authority but it's boundary does not match what the man on the clapham 
omnibus would regard as the area of the town.

Tom

-- 
Tom Hughes (tom at compton.nu)
http://compton.nu/