[OSM-talk] Request for feedback: new building colours in openstreetmap-carto

[Minh Nguyen]

On 2014-11-28 14:37, Mihkel Rämmel wrote:
> By making all religious buildings highly visible on the current
> buildings demo style it makes a great style to use when you want to
> visit all the religious places nearby but nothing else. I do not know
> about the rest of the world but at least in a typical eastern european
> city only a few of the religious buildings can be concidered
> landmarks. In my home city it is 1 of 5.

Here in the New World, the proportion of significant churches is 
similarly low in many places. Using Cincinnati, Ohio, and its 
surrounding county as an example, only 25% of OSM-tagged religious 
buildings could be considered historic.

overpass turbo shows 201 ways in the county that are tagged 
amenity=place_of_worship, amenity:historic=place_of_worship, or 
building=church. (We're starting to use specific building tags like 
=church around here, but we aren't quite there yet.) By comparison, only 
45 churches and five synagogues have Wikipedia articles [1] and only 33 
buildings with "church", "chapel", "cathedral", or "temple" in their 
names are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. [2] By 
comparison, Wikipedia has more articles on high schools in the same 
county. [3]

If you include the 460 place-of-worship POIs that could someday be 
remapped as building footprints, the statistic would drop to less than 
8%. (We've already deleted or retagged GNIS-imported churches marked 
"historic".)

The Cincinnati-Middletown metropolitan statistical area was ranked 71st 
most religious in a 2012 Gallup poll of 189 U.S. MSAs. Granted, that's a 
measure of the importance residents place on religion, not the city's 
church architecture. But there are plenty of places in this country 
where churches are even less important.

I don't dispute that churches are important to navigation in many older 
cities, particularly in Europe. But openstreetmap-carto contributors 
have always reiterated the importance of keeping regional styles to a 
minimum. The other building types included in the buildings-major layer 
(supermarket, mall, attraction) each have an inherent largeness or 
importance, but globally, churches aren't necessarily large or key to 
wayfinding. (What about building=mosque, building=temple, etc.?)

[1] 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Churches_in_Hamilton_County,_Ohio>
[2] 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Register_of_Historic_Places_listings_in_Hamilton_County,_Ohio>
[3] 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:High_schools_in_Hamilton_County,_Ohio>

-- 
minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us