On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 at 2:27 PM Paul Allen <pla16...@gmail.com> wrote: > All of which contrasts with US usage where it appears that any settlement of > any size > can style itself a city.
Each of the fifty states very likely has a different set of rules. There's also a difference between the style and the legality. New City, New York (pop. about 34000) is legally a hamlet, despite being a county seat. Garden City, New York (pop. about 22000) is a village in the Town of Hempstead - and its most formal style is "Village of Garden City". (Incidentally, it _does_ have a cathedral.) There are other municipalities with "City" in their names (Johnson City, etc.) that are not chartered cities. None of these, however, is formally styled, "City of XXX". Sherrill. New York (pop .about 3000), is a chartered city, but in practice it is administered as a village within the Town of Vernon. (It's still styled "City of Sherrill") The same goes for the style "Town" except for the formal "Town Of XXX". Elizabethtown is indeed a town. Cooperstown is a village (well, mostly, it is one of 12 villages that were chartered rather than incorporated under the Village Law), Middletown is a chartered city, and Levittown is a hamlet (pop. about 52000, so arguably it's a small city, but legally it remains a hamlet). There can be redundant style there: "Town of Orangetown", for instance. New York City is a case unto itself, since it is coterminous with five counties, and the counties have ceded their executive and leglslative authority to it. The counties retain an independent judiciary, and a ceremonial executive branch. It is today styled "City of New York." Some of its founding documents named it the "City of Greater New York," but that name didn't wind up on its charter. The counties are styled "Boroughs" when talking of them as divisions of New York City, but still "Counties" for the courts. (And confusingly, three have different names as county and as borough: Borough of Manhattan/New York County; Borough of Staten Island/Richmond County; Borough of Brooklyn/Kings County.) There's also breakage of the hierarchy elsewhere. The City of Geneva has annexed across a county line. About one village in six lies in multiple townships. No town or city (except for New York and Geneva) crosses a county line, though, so _that_ part of admin_level is _nearly_ hierarchical. We also have one `boundary=aboriginal_lands`, Akwesasne (not mapped as such in OSM because of some political controversies) that crosses an international border (and has some existence by treaty with the First Nations, although both the US and Canada routinely ignore it). `admin_level=*` is approximate at best. -- 73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
