[Talk-us] Retagging hamlets in the US

Kevin Kenny kkenny2 at nycap.rr.com
Wed Mar 18 23:20:33 UTC 2015


On 03/17/2015 05:25 AM, Paul Johnson wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 14, 2015 at 7:44 PM, Alex Barth <alex at mapbox.com 
> <mailto:alex at mapbox.com>> wrote:
>
>     What do people think about how to properly retag place=hamlet in
>     US urban areas?
>
>     My colleague Eliane rendered out a map of all hamlets in urban
>     areas in the US:
>
>     http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/samely/diary/34541
>
>     I just posted how we could fix this:
>
>     http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/samely/diary/34541#comment29931
>
>
> I'm in favor of a bulk edit for US hamlets within city boundaries to 
> be retagged as place=neighbourhood
>

Careful with this!

In New York, hamlets are very often quite well-defined entities. They 
have road signs at their borders, the people who live in them 
self-identify as residents of the hamlet, they frequently have post 
offices named for them, and so on. What they lack is a distinct local 
government. Instead, their government is that of the township that 
contains them.

I would be quite annoyed if the hamlet that was my home town when I was 
growing up (Inwood, New York) were to be tagged as a "neighbourhood" of 
"Hempstead".  "Town of Hempstead," in the present day, has very little 
land in Hempstead - limited to a smallish tract surrounding the town 
hall. The rest of Hempstead is "Village of Hempstead" - whose residents 
self-identify as living in Hempstead. The residents of the 
unincorporated areas of the township do NOT identify as living in Hempstead.

Some of these "hamlets" are in fact medium-sized cities that never 
troubled to incorporate. Levittown, New York, for instance is a hamlet 
with a population of over fifty thousand.

And - local mappers have already done considerable tidying with respect 
to New York hamlets. This sort of mechanical edit means that the local 
mappers would have to go back and retag the hamlets yet again.

-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin




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