Hello @edops. Thank you for joining the discusssion. I appreciate your enthusiasm for improving place classification and I hope you will choose to participate in a productive way. Through community discussion and consensus building I’m sure we can make durable changes to the New England hierarchy of place classification. This is not something that can be implemented by a single mapper. Continued attempts to go it alone will only lead to more churn.
In addition to the previously linked discussion on New England place name inflation, there have also been several recent dicussions focused on other areas of the country. Lots of good ideas in these threads.
- Place classification - town vs suburb, remote rural areas, how does a CDP relate to place
- Recent Alaska place= reclassification
While no one has formally proposed a set of guidelines yet, we seem to be coalescing around using the Census Bureau’s Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas as a starting point. Simple population thresholds for each class of place will not work. A 10,000 person settlement can be quite significant within a sparsely populated rural region, while a 50,000 person settlement can be fairly insignificant within in a densely populated metropolitan region. Place classification reflects the relative significance of a settlement and thus some significant places with low populations will be correctly classified above some insignificant places with higher populations. This is not easy to get right!