Wait a sec, which one is this supposed to be evidence of? This seems focused on place-names, but looks like it only renders independent municipalities as places: Cambridge, Quincy, and Brookline get dots and labels, but ostensibly equivalent suburbs that are part of Boston proper, like Roxbury, Brighton, Back Bay, and South Boston, are not shown. Cambridge, Quincy, Lynn, and other bigger places also get bigger labels than smaller towns like Lexington and Saugus, although not as big as Boston or Worcester. The line between ‘medium’ and ‘small’ seems to be at a slightly lower population than prevailing city/town tagging though, since places like Waltham and Hingham make the cut for intermediate font even though they’re tagged as place=town in OSM, same as Lexington and Saugus.
I guess this doesn’t clarify to me that place=town or suburb is clearly a better tag than city for somewhere like Cambridge or Lynn? In fact, it seems to support them at least staying on the city/town/etc. hierarchy, and that at some point there are more possible gradations than current OSM tagging permits.
That’s a good point. This is of course going to depend on the the map, but I’ve seen a number of Massachusetts maps that display labels for Somerville, Cambridge, and Brookline (all independent municipalities) while not showing labels for Brighton, Roxybury, or Dorchester (annexed to Boston).
Anyway, right now deciding exactly what qualifies as place=suburb is probably less important than deciding what qualifies as place=city. Once we have consensus on that, the lower classes should become clearer.
Right, whether we want to make Cambridge =town or suburb, I wouldn’t care all that much – but I’d argue strongly against it being an =city as that area is covered by the place=city + name=Bostonnode, which is conceptually completely separate from the type=boundary + boundary=administrative + admin_level=8 + border_type=cityrelation.
I’m finding this popuation density map from the census quite helpful for identifying potential place=citys. I’ve circled in red the densest urban cores that look like candidates to me. In a general sense, I think of the big circle in the middle as Boston and I think this shows quite well how Cambridge is a central part of this dense urban core (i.e. part of the same place=city as Boston). On the other hand, Lowell and Brockton are distinct clusters of high density separated from the Boston cluster by some lower density space.
This is Google Maps in a trenchcoat, and I’m glad you bring it up. In its heydey before things got weird, Google Maps pioneered the practice of clearing a “donut” around a major city, improving legibility. While I don’t favor baking specific presentational choices into the database, I appreciate that the urban areas force us to consider a similar “sphere of influence” around an urban core.
By some measures, it’s totally unfair for us to subordinate giant places to even gianter places while cutting punier, more distant places some slack. But the settlement-related place=* values become more useful when they can communicate something about the relationships between places. Some maps will use this classification scheme to establish better information hierarchy, while others will eschew it in favor of a scale based on population alone, in order to simplify the legend and make labels more predictable. Both approaches are valid in the hands of a map designer, as long as the population figures are based on something realistic like UAs.
Thanks for pointing to this! On OSMUS Slack, I found this approach analogous to finding the topographic prominence of a mountain. I think an approach like this is a pretty sensible answer to my earlier question:
To put it into words, if density declines significantly in between two places of sufficiently high density (so that each has high “prominence”), then both might be place=city. But if two places are part of one continuously high density/“thickly settled” area, and one is much larger than the other, only the bigger one should be place=city, while the smaller, low “prominence” place gets demoted. In this example, such an approach would allow places like Lynn and Lowell to remain place=city, while leading to the demotion of places like Newton and Cambridge, which are not sufficiently distinct from Boston despite their large municipal populations, to place=town. I find this result fairly reasonable! And it provides a nice check/elaboration on the census Urban Areas, which I think are a good starting point am wary about implementing with no flexibility.
I’ll add here that I think a little more nuance will be needed in the largest/densest areas, where significantly high densities persist across an entire 50+ mile region. But there are realistically only a few cities in the US sufficiently large for this to be a problem, and they aren’t in New England, so it’s off topic here. I’ve appreciated the discussion here!
I would personally draw the Boston conurbation wider, from Hull to Beverly, and west all the way to Route 128. I don’t think there’s a significant enough break in density up to Lynn or down to Quincy to really separate them from Boston’s influence. Heck, Quincy is even on Boston’s subway lines and isn’t even the last stop.
That makes sense. The circles I drew are meant as city candidates subject to other criteria as well, not places I definitely think should be cities. I can definitely see Lynn not having enough density prominence to be separate from Boston, same as Quincy.
We seem to be coalescing on a definition of place=city that looks maybe like this:
place=city is used for place nodes that:
Represent the most significant center of population (the “urban core”) of an extended urban area with a sufficiently high population that it should be categorized at the same level of significance with other cities in the region.
Have sufficient separation from other place=city nodes that they represent a separate urban core and extended urban area - OR - represent an additional urban core within a larger extended urban area where the urban core is of similar magnitude to the principal city.
For the most part, I think that definition is reasonable and fairly obvious.
This gestures at the notion that smaller places in sparser areas should get a boost. The Urban Area algorithm already has a tool for evening out the density of places across denser and sparser parts of the country, up to a point: it’s everywhere census block housing density is used as an input. Conceptually, this assumes that a certain urban density is necessary to establish that character of a place so big you can only know it partially, to paraphrase @Adam_Franco.
By contrast, ad hoc measures of regional significance tend to expose differences of perspective rather than guiding us toward consensus. We can only assign each place a single place=* value regardless of zoom level, but any time you zoom in, a larger set of places becomes regionally significant. People from one region will disagree markedly about the significance of places in another region, based on renown alone. Places can take on added significance in mass media or transportation that don’t greatly affect other aspects of life, as in Bangor and its special status as an emergency stop for transatlantic flights.
Before dismissing NETCAs, you should consider implementing Micropolitan areas as cities as opposed to Metros only. Also, since US Census has a 50,000 city center as a standard for metros as opposed to micros, this could be applied to separate major cities from huge metros, such as Nashua, Lowell, and Cambridge from the Boston metro. And of course, the rare cases that need exceptions, like the tiny Vermont capital of Montpelier, would have exceptions. This would almost match up perfectly with the current map. For example:
Maine Cities
Portland, ME (metro, South Portland included)
Lewiston, ME (metro, Auburn included)
Bangor, ME (metro)
Sanford, ME (micro)
Brunswick, ME (micro)
Augusta, ME (micro)
Waterville, ME (micro)
Removes Rockland, Presque Isle, and Biddeford from current map.
Adds Sanford to current map.
Vermont Cities
Burlington, VT (metro, South Burlington included)
Montpelier, VT (would be separate from Barre due to capital city status)
Barre, VT (micro)
Bennington, VT (micro)
Rutland, VT (micro)
Removes nothing from current map.
Adds Bennington to current map.
New Hampshire Cities
Manchester, NH (metro)
Nashua, NH (would separate from Boston metro, due to a core pop. greater than 50,000 people)
Concord, NH (micro)
Berlin, NH (micro)
Claremont, NH (micro)
Dover, NH (metro, Durham included)
Laconia, NH (micro)
Keene, NH (micro)
Lebanon, NH (micro)
Portsmouth, NH (metro)
Removes Rochester from current map.
Adds Berlin to current map.
Including such a broad list of places as place=city is counter to the sentiment in New England place name inflation and commentary that place nodes east of the Mississippi are overclassified.
Including such locations such as Berlin, NH (population < 10,000), would then cause me to insist on adding not only Newport, RI, but also other small locations that have similar compact centers such as Wakefield, RI, Westerly, RI, Woonsocket, RI, and Pawtucket, RI.
Since it’s suggested to have Cambridge be a separate city despite it being a clear outgrowth of Boston, I would also similarly insist that the Providence suburbs of Warwick and Cranston be similarly tagged place=city.
OMB establishes and maintains these areas solely for statistical purposes. In reviewing and revising these areas, OMB does not take into account, or attempt to anticipate, any public or private sector nonstatistical uses of the delineations. …
Furthermore, the MSA and µSA delineations do not produce an urban-rural classification, and confusion of these concepts has the potential to affect the ability of a program to effectively target either urban or rural areas, if that is the program goal. …
In 2020, the OMB rejected an official recommendation to raise the minimum population to qualify an MSA from 50,000 to 100,000, pending further study. While acknowledging that 100,000 would be a more accurate reflection of population, they were concerned about disrupting the administration of ongoing federal programs. We have no such backwards compatibility concerns.
Moreover, 50,000 is the minimum population of the urban area at the core of a CBSA, not the minimum population of the CBSA itself. As explained in the 2010 standards, this threshold was carried over from the former 50,000 threshold between urban clusters and urbanized areas. In other words, this is the threshold that had been frozen since 1950 and finally tossed out as antiquated when defining the 2020 urban areas. The country’s population has more than doubled since 1950; there’s no reason OSM needs to turn back the clock by 75 years.
Previous discussions on this forum and on the Slack have had good agreement that Berlin is just too small to be a place=city since the end of the timber boom. The largest three employers are the hospital, the prison, and the other prison.
If Berlin, NH, a city with a defined micropolitan area, is unacceptable, then why is Presque Isle, ME still tagged as a city?
The reason Berlin has a NECTA is because of its isolation. The distance between Berlin, NH and Concord, NH is over twice the distance between Newport, RI and Providence, RI. Wakefield, Westerly, Woonsocket, and Pawtucket are even closer together. There’s a reason they’re all part of the Providence metropolitan area. The entire state of Rhode Island is smaller in size than the Bangor, ME and Portland, ME metro areas.
I don’t think you’re aware that there have already been attempts to downsize New England city labels in the past to only include larger cities with metro areas. Because of cases such as Montpelier and Augusta, it will never be accepted.
New England has less of a city inflation problem, and much more of a lack of standardisation problem. I support a standard that comes from an independent, government source, that doesn’t drastically change the map that currently exists.
If you try to limit a state like Vermont to Burlington only, a state like Maine to Portland, Bangor, and Lewiston only, you will never get a large enough consensus to implement those changes, at least if you to expect them to last more than a week.
