[OSM-talk] landuse=urban

[Nick Whitelegg]

On Saturday 10 Feb 2007 12:54, Tom Chance wrote:
> Ahoy,
>
> On Saturday 10 February 2007 12:18:28 Nick Whitelegg wrote:
> > What would be useful I feel is a generic tag for any urban area, so that
> > urban and countryside areas can easily be distinguished. landuse=urban
> > seems a good choice. This would make it easy, for example, to draw an
> > urban area based on the Landsat or Yahoo imagery. Any comments on this?
>
> Just curious, what do we lack with
> landuse=residential/retail/industrial/etc? If people use those then surely
> entire urban areas are clearly marked off? If there are urban areas that
> don't fit into those categories then we could expand the list.
>
> Regards,
> Tom

The problem is that you might not know what is what, also it's significantly 
more effort (could involve creating 50 areas rather than just one). If you're 
using Landsat imagery or Yahoo imagery outside of the high-resolution areas, 
you can easily tell what's urban and what isn't, but little more than that.

That's not to say remove the finer-grained classification, but marking out 
whole urban areas with landuse=urban would make mapping which aims to 
distinguish between urban and non-urban areas much easier to generate.

Nick