[Talk-GB] Town v City

[David Earl]

place=city, contrary to various differing cultural uses of the word 
City, used to be somewhere over a certain population, 100K IIRC. 
However, it appears the definition on the wiki has been substantially 
relaxed, as has town. Nevertheless it is still defined by size, albeit 
woolly: "The largest urban settlements in the territory" and in OSM has 
nothing to do with ceremonial or institutional status.

I think it is a shame that this happened, but it is hard to change now. 
I think it would be better to state the facts, and then leave it up to 
the consumer (renderer, router, whatever) to decide on how it interprets 
those facts.

Naively, a renderer would use population to decide on label sizes. But 
that has a problem in how the data is sourced (the US often has 
population on "city" limit signs, but we don't here).

But population isn't the only criterion. Some places punch above their 
weight, because they are regional markets or transport hubs or whatever. 
The ceremonial status (Ely) sometimes reflects this, but is sometimes 
just a historical anomaly (St Davids). But somnetimes it can be quite 
extreme: for example Hay-on-Wye, population about 2,000, isn't even 
really a town in OSM parlance, but is a very important settlement 
locally in an area where west of Hereford there isn't much of any size, 
and would probably be shown on most maps just one grade down from Hereford.

Similarly, Bedford is probably not populationally a city, but I think 
most people would subjectively class it alongside Cambridge, which isn't 
much bigger.

I think there's also a problem at the top end. Cambridge (120,000) is at 
the very low end from a population POV, and is completely qualitatively 
and quantitatively different from places like Birmingham and Manchester. 
I think we are missing something to distinguish these massive 
conurbations. And Manchester and even London pale before places like 
Mexico City. There seem to me to be Cambridge and Bedford-like places - 
essentially large and important "towns", Sheffield and Leeds-like places 
(small "cities"), Birmingham and Manchester-like places (large 
metropolitan areas), London and New York-like like places (very large 
cities) and the real giants like Mexico City and Tokyo (megacities)

More generally, I think we still need a way to reflect cultural 
references and concepts while linking to global commonalities.

David