As previously mentioned in a previous conversation there are two elements defining Haifa’s boundary. (The specific polygons in from that conversation are gone). This is an issue that seems to come up often as in this conversation.
The residential zone seems to more accurately map the boundary of Haifa, both based on data from the city of Haifa and Wikipedia. I wanted to check before deleting the city way and moving its data to the residential relation.
They are both tagged wrongly. There should not be a massive landuse=residential area covering the whole city, as there are many areas within that are not residential. Usually a city would have a official boundary mapped as an admin area relation.
Last I checked, this is an issue affecting nearly all cities in Israel. I brought it up in the Telegram group back then, but didn’t get much attention and personally I don’t have what it takes to start fixing it. Fixing it will be a massive editing challenge, well worth the effort IMO but not a job for one person (not me at least). Needs some good coordination.
I guess mappers did this in the early days so the shape of the city shows up on a map.
Yeah, looking on overpass there are over 1200 named landuse=residential in Israel. I would say that where proper admin boundaries are defined for the city, town, the landuse=residential tag can be removed or deleted. Starting from scratch is the only way to encourage the creation of detailed, smaller landuses.Something like Jerusalem has duplicated boundary=administrative relations e.g. Relation: Jerusalem (1381350) | OpenStreetMap (real) and Relation: Jerusalem (6502363) | OpenStreetMap (fake).
When it comes to things like villages, I doubt the residential areas are official boundaries, so they should only be mapped with a place=village node, and then the residential area can be unnamed and split to exclude non-residential areas.