[Talk-GB] City centre landuse tagging

[SK53]

I've always been of the view
<https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/23994/tagging-landuse-in-downtown-areas>
that one should map the primary landuse at ground level, so for a typical
UK city or town centre retail would generally apply. Most usually have some
obvious ancillary commercial areas of mainly offices. We don't have a
specific landuse for entertainment dominated areas, although that might be
useful. I'd reserve landuse=mixed for areas where retail, office and
residential are really heavily interspersed at the street level (unusual in
the UK except perhaps where retail is in retreat). An alternative is to use
a broad brush landuse=commercial. My general experience of consuming these
tags is that broad-brush tags are actually much less useful than apparently
more restrictive ones. Basically, its far more useful to know that
somewhere is a shopping area than that it's not residential.

For suburban shopping parades I think landuse=retail is fairly standard,
although most will have flats above (these are often quite hard to use as
security for mortgages, apparently fast food outlets have quite a high risk
of fire).

Although one could add a secondary_landuse tag, in general I think it's
better to just subtag the type of retail area and this can be used to
inform likely secondary uses (a parade likely has residential use, a retail
park no other secondary uses, a town centre both commericial &
residential).

Specific problems currently arising are the conversion of former office
blocks or offices in a mixed-use retail/office block to flats (mainly
student flats). It's difficult to be precise but my impression is that city
centre offices are declining fast in favour of student flat conversions.
Some of this, at least, is driven by parking restrictions favouring some
office businesses to relocate out-of-town. One could do more detailed
microtagging of building use or of operator. I think identifying student
flats is something of general interest as it is quite a significant change
in many places.

Elsewhere with less restrictive planning categories (and associated
potential rental income) it can be very hard to categorise. As far as I
could see most places in Buenos Aires were completely mixed landuse.

Last point is that it is possible to programmatically identify some of
these areas, providing that shops and other POIs are mapped in detail. See
my old blog posts
<https://sk53-osm.blogspot.com/2013/04/segmentation-of-retail-landuse-why-do.html>
and Stefan Keller's presentation
<https://2018.stateofthemap.org/2018/A30-Areas-of-Interest_for_OpenStreetMap_with_Big_Spatial_Data_Analytics_/>
at SotM18 on Areas of Interest.

Jerry

On Fri, 1 May 2020 at 12:23, Nick Whitelegg <nick.whitelegg at solent.ac.uk>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Meant to include this in my other post, but...I'm noticing that several
> cities in the UK (Bristol, Bath and Chester are good examples) don't seem
> to tag the city centre area with an appropriate landuse tag (presumably
> retail, commercial or residential).
>
> This is something I've missed over the years... but what is the common
> practice for tagging city centre areas? Presumably the above three landuses
> are not used because city centres are typically a mixrure of all three.
>
> What I'm trying to achieve is a 'built-up-area' rendering which covers the
> whole of the built up area of a town or city. Not looking for
> administrative boundaries - but the actual physically built-up area.
>
> Thanks,
> Nick
>
>
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