[OSM-talk-ie] Time to talk about landuse=residential

[Ciarán Staunton]

I want to say a couple of things as context, so there will be no
misunderstandings about what I want to touch on. This conversation keeps
nearly happening on Telegram, but might work better here.
1. When it comes to landuses I realise there are several types, but my eye
is drawn to landuse=residential simply because there are a number of us
adding/editing these using very different styles. The intention is not to
disrespect any particular style, but hopefully to have a bit of a think
about better and best ways to handle adding or editing a residential
landuse.
2. My observations are mainly drawn from suburban North Dublin, but I have
been mapping recently also in Tipperary, Donegal, Derry, and Kildare. But
please note the slightly urban bias.
3. I have not quantified anything, but I want  to mention some examples if
that can be tolerated.
4. It is not my expectation that the map will be entirely consistent nor
inconsistent. I do imagine that we should be talking and coaching each
other more about how to be more consistent.

Some residential landuses are enormous, they are literally the whole town
or whole village, they take in (without much nuance) half pieces of fields,
rivers, the sea, forests and woods. They were drawn quickly I would say,
with the intention of adding finesse at a later stage, the problem is
nobody has added that finesse in a lot of cases.

At what can literally be the heart of such residential landuses, the
commerical centre and indusrial clusters can be incoporated without any
relational segregation, and potentially all other little types of landuses,
shopping and civic areas and so forth. I know there is a tolerance of
parking and greens being "secondary" landuses within a residential landuse,
but I also see these segregated in other countries.The towns of southern
Kildare bear a lot of examples of this, but frankly it is ubiquitous.

Taking a different approach to the above entirely and you see an effort to
draw long, linear and jagged polygons along roadways, to join together
ribbon developments in a single and improbable residential area, which
obviously bears no name and stretches from Bundoran to the Fermanagh border.

Even in urban Dublin several suburbs could be lumped together into a large
residential landuse - see Clontarf may has eaten away what most people call
Raheny - or there could be micro detail of mapping out individual
developments which are simply driven by the similarity of thoroughfare name
- see Ramleh near Clonskeagh. It goes without saying that some residential
landuses are named, while others are not.

When these areas are drawn there are even different micro approaches to how
to create their edge. In Finglas and Ballymun someone went around and
joined the residential landuses to each other and the centre of highways. I
don't like this myself as any adjustment to any feature means all the other
features could be altered in unintended ways. Add into this stew the
joining of the residential areas to townlands, or other boundaries and
there starts to be complicated relational problems if anyone has a mind to
fix any of the individual elements. Literally beside those two areas in
Glanevin there is a complete avoidance of these admixtures of connected
nodes, with transport corridors avoided altogether, but 'internal'
residential roads included.

I'm very interested to hear what others think about this, and how we can do
more to iron out these issues.

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