First, overlapping landuse areas (even different ones) should *always* be corrected. It brings problems with the map data, I have seen and corrected areas where the overlapping did hide ponds from the rendered map. The *same* overlapping area masks some of the problems but should be corrected as well - either by deleting of one of the areas or by merging both together.
The next question is the landuse *size* in the mapped area. >From the view of the mapper in Europe, the landuse=residential in HOT is problematic. The residential area should be only where the region is used *above all* for housing people. The HOT use is to mark areas where there are *some* houses, depending on the project instructions. This ends with a very problematic rendering of some areas. Visually, you get one big blob of something most people understand as a town, not the reality of fields and farms. The very loose residential areas shouldn’t be there at all, IMHO. Villages/towns boundaries have their own tag, *boundary*. Usually, this is paired with boundary=administrative which is mostly unusable for HOT distance mapping because the information isn't available to the mapper. But nothing speaks against own tag - see here <http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:boundary>. IMHO, the ideal solution would be to change the HOT practice of mapping residential areas. Leave landuse=residential only to the areas, where the buildings are densely packed together (even in a village, where there is *real* street there might be a residential area) - keeping the common interpretation. Give the residential area a lower importance than it has now, and start using the boundary instead, for example boundary=residential to mark the areas with buildings. A later mapping on the ground or use of governmental data if available could then change this in real administrative areas marking the hamlets, villages, and towns where appropriate and leaving the *residential* boundaries to the rural farm areas. Ideally, such change would be preceded by discussing on the HOT and tagging list and followed by updating the wiki definition of a boundary, and by updating the HOT materials for users. It would need a slight change in JOSM HOT presets and in the iD editor as well, probably. However, it shouldn’t be very difficult to do so. I understand the residential areas are used for getting population density in the HOT projects. The use of both tags together would be a better choice, getting the information about sparsely and densely populated areas at the same time. Majka On 29 March 2017 at 08:10, Vao Matua vaoma...@gmail.com <http://mailto:vaoma...@gmail.com> wrote: > Nick & John, Determining where to draw the edge of landuse=residential can be difficult. Here in Ethiopia most of the population lives in a rural setting where they farm areas of 1 to 10 hectares in size. http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/6.9634/38.4408 There are places where people live in villages, but often dwellings are quite dispersed.
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