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

[Donal Hunt]

Definitely a juicy topic for discussion...

Two observations from my perspective (biases to be mentioned later):

1) Named residential areas
I am an advocate for using named residential areas, especially for newer
developments which have not become lodged in the general public's memory.
For growing communities, the evolution of the built environment can be
fascinating and we have a means of capturing data that will be of interest
in future decades.

I recently mapped Whitechurch, Co. Cork to quite a high level of detail and
using named residential areas was actually quite helpful for showing how
the village has evolved over time. It's also helpful for wayfinding because
even locals aren't familiar with the road names / estates that have been
developed.

For long established residential areas, it probably doesn't make as much
sense but there may still be historical value in detailing out the phases
of suburbs as they grew. Crumlin and Drimnagh specifically have evolved
over many decades with a number of different developers.

2) Guidance for mappers is always welcome

Guidance for mappers, coders, etc are always a great idea to ensure
consistency and set expectations. I'm a fan of "just enough structure" to
ensure forward momentum and robustness. As someone who has encountered the
situation of "the boundary follows the stream but now the stream has moved"
a number of times, it can be painful to unpick boundaries from other ways
when the ways themselves have changed.

In addition, since I tend to map more rural areas, deciding where to draw
the line around a residential area can be ambiguous at times. Should it
span both sides of a rural road? What if there are gaps? etc I do have a
closet interest in the data being usable in the future for identifying
residential clusters. I have a strong opinion that all new housing should
be in villages / towns and if there is a very real need to not build there
(I don't agree with many of the reasons currently allowed), build it within
an existing cluster at the very least. It breaks my heart to continue
seeing 1-off housing in the middle of nowhere and the residents then
complaining about services.

Biases:
 - I live in the countryside (in a cluster of houses)
 - Named residential areas are great!
 - I live in Cork boi.
 - The worst thing is often to do nothing at all...

Hope there is something useful in there.

Donal


On Sun, 3 Apr 2022 at 14:44, Ciarán Staunton <ciaran.staunton at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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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