[Talk-GB] What is a residential area?

David Woolley forums at david-woolley.me.uk
Tue May 7 11:04:09 UTC 2019


On 07/05/2019 11:11, Martin Wynne wrote:
> What is a "residential area" in the iD editor? How many dwellings are 
> needed in what proximity to become one? Is it a physical plot of land on 
> which at least one person lives? Or the usual meaning of a 
> village/hamlet/housing estate/suburb where a number of people live?

I would say it was anything that was landuse=residential, and, in the 
UK, that would basically be anything where the primary planning class 
was C3 or C4.

However OSM usage is always fuzzy.
> 
> In my patch there are lots of instances where a single house or an 
> isolated pair of cottages along a country road have been mapped as a 
> "residential area". Which seems a strange use of words to me.

OSM land uses can be nested, and landuse=residential is the only way I 
know of of showing the curtilage of a house, so if there is nothing 
better it could be on a such a micro scale.  If you have a gated 
development, or an estate with communal gardens, I would consider using 
a nested landuse=residential.

> I tend to change them to leisure=garden, access=private. When I do that, 

If you are going to micromap to that extent, you should exclude the 
house itself.    I would suggest that whole plot would be 
landuse=residential, and if the garden was of particular scenic value, 
it should be placed on top of that.


> the iD editor removes the landuse=residential tag. Should it? Should I 
> put it back?  I also put a fence or hedge or wall around or between them 
> if visible on Bing, add the buildings, and a name if it's known to me or 
> shown on OS OpenData.

Very few people would map to that level of detail.  Some people take the 
view that you should not map curtilages, because they are difficult to 
verify, but I think this is normally possible to do with reasonable 
accuracy (actually even Land Registry property maps only given 
approximate boundaries).  On the other hand, I consider house numbers 
much more important than buildings or curtilages.
> 
> But is that the correct thing to do? If I do one, am I obliged to do all 
> the others nearby? Users of OSM might legitimately wonder why some 
> properties and residents are singled out for this treatment, and others 
> are not? Should we concentrate on adding detail, or aim for uniformity 
> of treatment?

The level of detail in OSM is always going to vary widely, not least 
because different people have different priorities.

Although some people cut schools and parks out of landuse=residential, 
councils tend not to see it that way, but rather as those being 
allowable in such areas.  OSM generally expects data users to understand 
that, for some purposes, e.g. rendering, a nested school or park 
overrides a general landuse classification.




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