[OSM-talk] mapping grass

[Robin Paulson]

2008/8/2 David Earl <david at frankieandshadow.com>:
> I've been doing it as leisure=park too. Why? Because I suggested
> landuse=grass soon after I started mapping a couple of years ago for
> exactly the bits between houses where you might otherwise expect houses
> to be, large traffic islands etc, but I was met with such a massively
> negative reaction from the list ("it's no different from a park" - when
> plainly it is), so I gave up and did them as parks and have been doing
> so ever since. That's why Cambridge and South Cambridgeshire is littered
> with tiny little parks!

i'd tend to agree. a park has a very specific meaning, making it
different from a patch of grass in a public space, which i would
consider to be part of the public right of way it is adjacent to.

there are usually a set of rules and regulations, which apply to
parks, which will be common to all parks under a given jurisdiction
(city council, regional council, national parks organisation, etc.).

this is the reason the concept of a park prevails today - to enable
separation from patches of grass or other unremarkable areas of land.
when we consider national parks, there are often acts of parliament to
explicitly protect them, and set in stone the rules and regulations
for using them - by contrast, the only rules that apply to random
patches of grass, such as those on the meridian strip/central
reservation of roads, are the general laws of the land.

as an aside, the idea of landuse=grass strikes me as a bit silly.
residential, commercial and retail i can understand, but this going a
bit far; it's not describing what the land is used for, the whole
point of the landuse tag. if we really want to tag this (and i think
this may just be tagging for the renderers - all-in-all a bad thing),
then natural=grass would be far more useful