So I don’t really understand why Key:residential - OpenStreetMap Wiki says we should use residential=duplex for this kind of areas with only semi-detached houses, instead of residential=semi-detached:
Sure, the term “duplex” may mean 2 houses attached to each other on one side only, but as far as I know, the more popular term is semi-detached. Additionally, in French-speaking countries, the term duplex means an apartment with 2 floors - which adds to the confusion.
So if semi-detached is used for the building tag, then it should also be used for the residential tag. On the wiki, residential=duplex has been added on 31 January 2023 through this edit, seemingly without any prior discussion.
That’s why I think we should change the wiki from residential=duplex to residential=semi-detached and adopt it. The former only has 274 uses, the latter 26 (both seem suprisingly low to me, because this kind of residential areas with semi-detached houses seem to become more and more popular in new developments - this could be due to the confusion the wiki brings.)
IMHO neither makes a lot of sense, nor was it proposed or discussed in the wider community. If we wanted to subtag residential landuse, it would be more logical to make landuse sub-classes rather than repeating building classes.
These could for example refer to the urban structure (buildings attached to each other creating a closed line at the street vs. freestanding buildings) or to the kind of usage that can be found (only housing vs. houses and shops, etc.)
In addition, as an unproposed tag, the page only lists out the common values which you could come across and someone thought residential=duplex is worth mentioning.
Furthermore, this tag has been used only less than 300 times so a proposal to clean it up is possible and easy to execute.
There is the more established tag house=semi-detached which has the advantage over building=semidetached_house that it makes clear whether it is a house (building=house house=semi-detached) or a pair of houses (building=terrace house=semi-detached).
I agree. Residential areas can and do contain multiple different building types. Sub-classing by building type would encourage unnecessary splitting of residential areas wherever the building type is different. If landuse=residential is to be sub-classed, differentiating between urban, suburban, and rural character or high, medium, and low density would be more useful.
This made me realize residential=* is probably the most unclear tag I’ve seen. When we look at the most-used values, we have:
rural and urban for the type of area
apartments, single_family, trailer_park, irregular_settlement, duplex/semi-detached, terrace for the types of the buildings themselves
gated for… whether it’s a gated area or not (?) regardless of the type of building (?)
university for… college or university dormitory (?) regardless of the type of building (?)
And more than a thousand other values of all types.
So is this tag used to determine the type of buildings in the area or…? I’m confused. I don’t think there is a general consensus about its use. I’ve mostly been using it for gated communities/private residences to determine whether it’s an apartment complex, single family (detached) homes or semi-detached houses, only where there is no doubt about finding at least one building that’s different, because they’re all the same.
Not all of them. In the example image in my first post, it’s a gated community made only of semi-detached houses. Most apartment complexes only contain, well, apartments. Most high-end housing developments only contain semi-detached or detached houses. Of course, the larger the area we’re talking about is, the less likely it is we find the same type of buildings on every single building. But for smaller areas, such as gated communities or apartment complexes, they’re mostly developed in a way where all buildings are the same type.
for the spatial density, mapping building(parts) and their floorcount gives the full thing, but it doesn’t tell about people/occupants, so there could be a high/medium/low density subclass that would not be redundant, although finding the borders of each class would surely take us some time. It could also be a different tag and not the “main” distinction for residential landuse, and could be interesting.
The character-idea is also interesting although these categories would be very fuzzy and require some time to sort out. It could also be a different property, and could apply to other landuse like retail or commercial as well.
Urban, suburban or rural on the other hand are not specific to individual landuses but are usually properties of a bigger area. Maybe something history related would be interesting for European cities, pre-industrialization, industrialization to 20ies, up to 1945, then by decades, 50ies,60ies etc. but also this is mire something for a different tag.
Looking at the current values, it is unclear what the residential=* subtypes should express, there are several parallel systems and maybe it is also not necessary to specify it well, what can be specified could get its own tag
To me a pair of semi-detached houses are not a terrace, a terrace starts at 3 or more houses connected
There are wiki pages for residential=urban and residential=rural, however, whoever made the page for rural decided to use a picture of an extremely stereotypical suburban house in a typical American suburb rather than an actual rural area (wiki talk)
As a result I personally consider residential=rural and urban to be skunked tags
