[Talk-GB] Combined Authorities and Government Regions

[Colin Smale]

 At present there are relations present in OSM representing the nine former Government Regions. They are tagged as boundary=administrative and admin_level=5. These entities lost their (very limited) administrative role years ago and no longer have any administrative function (please correct me if I am wrong here...). They are however still extant in the context of statistics, being the NUTS level 1 regions. 


 At the same time we have gained a new type of administrative structure in England - the Combined Authority, which groups adjoining authorities in a geographic/economic region together. In contrast to the Government Regions these new authorities have attributes which makes them worthy of a place in the boundary=administrative hierarchy: They are (indirectly) democratically elected , and in many cases have a directly elected Mayor. The contituent authorities are mostly Metropolitan Districts (admin_level=8) and Unitary Authorities (admin_level=6) although Cambridgeshire and Peterborough contains a regular county (admin_level=6) *plus* its constituent non-metropolitan districts (admin_level=8). 


 Currently I am only able to find the following in OSM: 
 * Greater Manchester [3] 
 * West Midlands [4] 
 We are therefore missing the following Combined Authorities: 
 * South Yorkshire 
 * West Yorkshire 
 * Liverpool City Region 
 * Cambridgeshire and Peterborough 
 * West of England 
 * Tees Valley 
 * North East 
 * North Tyne 
 My proposal is: 
 * to deprecate the regions as admin boundaries, and retag them to boundary=statistical [1] 
 * to formally "allocate" admin_level=5 to the Combined Authorities (boundary=administrative, designation=combined_authority) 
 * manually retag the Regions and create relations for the missing Combined Authorities to consistently reflect the above 
 * update the wiki page boundary=administrative[2] to reflect updated UK usage 
 * any other wiki pages that will need updating 


 Does anyone have any comments, objections, suggestions? 


 Best regards, 
Colin Smale 


 Note this is not a proposal for an import or automated re-tagging. It will be done manually, individually and with care. I have a lot of experience with maintaining UK admin boundaries in OSM. 


 [1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/NUTS_and_LAU 
[2] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:boundary%3Dadministrative 
[3] https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/88084 
[4] https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6965187 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/attachments/20220506/3859b0b9/attachment.htm>