To summarize this discussion somewhat for wambacher:
What the Italians are essentially saying is:
- The mapped overlapping relations of grouped municipalities represent essentially two different types of entities:
- A) First, describing municipalities collaborating on topics of social and economic discourse, as happens in a lot of other countries as well, and sometimes or often ultimately resulting in a full merger of the communities into one administrative entity (at least that is what happens a lot here in the Netherlands, the situation in Italy may be slightly different in terms of actual mergers).
- B) Second, describing municipalities collaborating on a more specific topic: e.g. communities in mountainous areas working together on topics of forestry, tourism and maintenance of e.g. cross-communal hiking routes.
(* C) Possibly even more types of relations between communities collaborating on a specific topic: “cominità montane, aggregazioni funzionali di comuni, città metropolitane//o altro ancora”)
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While relations of type A and B may well overlap, two relations of type A or B only, should NOT overlap (and if I understood it well, they don’t in Italy). The examples shown, are of type A and B overlapping, and considered legit in Italy.
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The reason why both A and B carry admin_level=7 is that both represent an intermediate level of governance between municipalities and provinces. So from a hierarchical point of view, they both belong at level 7 (there was some suggestion in that list discussion to use level 9 for type B relations, but this was dismissed as being incorrect in terms of the hierarchy of admin levels).
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Martin also suggested a possible “type=boundary, boundary=region” relation as a possible option for type B relations, but this did not get traction either in the discussion.
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Overall it seems to be considered a legit situation to have both of these A and B relations at admin_level=7 and overlapping, and not a problem, “reality is more complex than we can describe…” is what Sergio wrote.