I'd like to clarify my take-aways from this discussion, hopefully yours, too. Thank you for reading and your patience.
Brian says that a common (THE common) definition of "suburb" in the US is (roughly) "a smaller city next to or near a much larger one as part of a conurbation." I agree that is a very frequent understanding of how the word "suburb" is both used and understood in the USA, even most or almost all of the time. I also assert that there is a (much less-common, agreed) usage for "suburb" in the US that is more in line with how OSM tags with place=suburb, as a kind of "district of a larger city." Magnolia (in Seattle) is tagged place=suburb, believed correctly as to how that tag should be used, even though Magnolia is CALLED a "neighborhood" in local vernacular. It seems these two usages of "suburb" can co-exist simultaneously (OSM tagging and local vernacular) while disagreeing slightly, though with some confusion unless and until this clarification is understood. OK, we've discussed it, I hope it is less confusing. (In the USA, we tend to CALL someplace like Bellevue a "suburb," though we correctly TAG it a place=city in OSM. Such differences between "call" and "tag" are the source of much of the confusion about "suburb" and "neighborhood" or place=neighbourhood). I fully support the use of place=neighbourhood tagging on nodes or polygons in the USA where it makes sense to do so. In a previous post, I said the logic of using place=neighbourhood in Seattle makes less sense, as there is a hierarchy with using place=* (city, suburb, neighbourhood, among other values if greater granularity exists). So, with what are CALLED neighborhoods being actually TAGGED place=suburb, there is "excess room" in that hierarchy: with Seattle tagged "city" and Magnolia (and other so-called neighborhoods) tagged "suburb," tagging Magnolia (and others) with place=neighbourhood (because it is "called" that) would leave a gap between neighbourhood and city: what suburb would Magnolia be a part of? Yes, as it was said somewhere that Seattle's "neighborhoods" have specific boundaries, it could be a small OSM project to restructure Seattle from nodes-tagged-suburb to polygons-tagged-neighbourhood. That could happen, though I still ask what place=suburb tag, if any, would be appropriate to bridge the gap between neighbourhood and city. Perhaps none, and that is OK, I'm not sure if this is "allowed" with place=* tagging, maybe it is. In the example I gave in the city of Santa Cruz (Prospect Heights "neighborhood," now tagged with a relatively large landuse=residential PLUS smaller more-correct, "block-level" landuse=residential polygons), our county wiki outlines a strategy for the already-existing large landuse=residential polygons (older, less correct, "first draft") and the smaller landuse=residential polygons (newer, more correct, "corrections to first draft underway"): when all the smaller, more correct polygons are completed, the landuse=residential tag on the larger, less correct is changed to place=neighbourhood! Santa Cruz, a city of about 65,000, already has five nodes tagged place=suburb, (13,000 in a suburb seems about right, these suburb names are widely used), as well as five or so "smaller" (in identity) scattered place=locality nodes (slightly different than the suburb or neighborhood names). This all works both in how the real world names things and in OSM: the City (multipolygon) is tagged place=city, its five suburbs (in the less common sense) are nodes tagged place=suburb, the "residential neighborhoods" are NOW tagged landuse=residential, yet OSM is on track (and documents how) we're converting these to better-granularity "block-level" landuse=residential polygons inside of larger polygons, and these larger polygons will be changed from landuse=residential to place=neighbourhood when full "inner high-granularity" polygons are completed inside of the to-be-designated place=neighbourhood larger enclosing polygons. (Additionally, there are some scattered nodes tagged place=locality, what might be considered "the bottom of the hierarchy," which have accrued and stabilized according to local convention). Clear! May this clarify similar strategies for better place=* tagging in the USA. It is complicated when US English diverges from the more British (or Australian) English that strongly influences wiki definitions of tags, but with some discussion, we can both better understand these potentially confusing (but ultimately understandable) differences, and tag well, even in the USA. SteveA _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
