But it was you who claimed that estates as large as a quarter or even a town exist in the first place, without giving an example that I’ve seen. In my view, an “estate” is smaller than or equal to a “neighbourhood”, depending on situation.
No, I don’t think that place= is a strict hierarchy in the first place, so you can’t be “orthogonal” to it. I see it as a dictionary of common types of (un)populated places, roughly scaled by size and characteristics, and where we are forced to find best fits. And currently I don’t see a slot there for named, planned-construction small residential blocks, gated or not.city_block is the nearest, but not quite adequate fit.
I’m asking if you suggest housing estates of larger sizes can use =quarter etc, isn’t it that they can’t be indicated as housing estates first, which is using place=estate . So we shouldn’t try to use place= for something that can exist in different corresponding place= scale. They have highly varying quantitative and qualitative aspects that aren’t “roughly scaled by size and characteristics” .
Orthogonality is not the same as whether is a hierarchy. It’s means whether something can be considered as both things somehow. You said =neighbourhood “might fit” in theory. Doesn’t that mean they are comparable enough? But the complex is a housing estate, the surrounding isn’t.
Your idea about =complex applying to WTC shows neither what use it is, nor what scale and importance it is. A office park or business park can be very large, an industrial park larger yet. One such “complex” feature that already exists is shop=mall . It doesn’t use place= .
Since we’ve basically taken over this thread by now, I’ll give some large examples from the U.S. that demonstrate the messy status quo:
The Woodlands is one of the largest master-planned residential developments in Texas, with over 114,000 residents. But OSM has not mapped the extent of this development per se. Instead, we’ve apparently mapped the census-designated place as a city boundary relation, even though it’s merely a statistical convenience for demographers. We’ve mapped all manner of landuse area inside the boundary, mostly reflecting landcover. And we’ve mapped a place=city node, reflecting the populated place’s size and geographic isolation. Multiple subdivisions within this development are mapped as place=village nodes and level 10 administrative boundaries, even though these divisions are of a private nature rather than public administration.
Wetherington is a large gated community in Ohio with over 1,300 residents. As with The Woodlands, we’ve mapped the CDP as a place multipolygon and a place=hamlet node (a bit incongruous for this endless sea of suburban sprawl). But we’ve also mapped the gated community itself as a named landuse area that excludes some adjacent retail areas that aren’t gated off while including the golf course that is an integral part of the community. The golf course overlaps the residential landuse area.
Landen is another large development nearby. The CDP includes many other adjacent developments that are only informally known as “Landen”. Unlike Wetherington, the actual Landen development isn’t gated and consists of many smaller named subdivisions. Each subdivision is mapped as a separate landuse area but has also been combined into an (invalid) multipolygon relation.
Lake Waynoka is typical of large developments out in the countryside that are centered on an artificial lake. I’ve mapped both the residential landuse area and the CDP boundary, which includes some surrounding residences and woodland that aren’t part of the development. Within the gated community, there is a small area set aside as a campground and another as a recreational facility. There’s also an artificial beach beside the lake. These landuse-like areas overlap with the residential area in the sense that one can consider themselves to be located within both simultaneously.
Gateway Ridge is an infill development formed by clearing some woods at the edge of a much larger neighborhood and extending a cul-de-sac by several more yards.
All these examples have in common the fact that they’re planned as homogeneous residential communities. Any deviation from that land use – for a pocket park or golf course – is incidental to the overall character of the development. I’m sure we can all think of existing place=* values that would describe each one of these examples, but no place=* value would be flexible enough to describe all of them without essentially meaning the same thing as landuse=residential.
We have a plethora of place tags, including some quite exotic such as isolated_dwelling or farm (why don’t you draw a building or a farmyard instead?)
place=farm is the tag for a named place, while landuse=farmyard is about land used as farmyard, it isn’t about an individual farmyard, could also be just a part of a farmyard or several adjacent farmyards.
building on the other hand is typically smaller than the whole farm, a farm consists of buildings and the areas between /around. These are not alternatives but should be used complementarily.
I don’t have a problem with this approach per se, but I do find named landuse areas to be a closer reflection of what these planned suburban developments are intended to be: a homogeneous area of land use, big or small, that is strongly associated with a particular name.
there is no guarantee of homogeneous landuse, it is just one ideology, the separation of functions, that led to this kind of urban structure in some regions, but it is already challenged if not considered outdated, by urban planners.
I’m asking if you suggest housing estates of larger sizes can use =quarter etc, isn’t it that they can’t be indicated as housing estates first, which is using place=estate
what is the defining property for a place to be considered an “estate”? Is it the same owner, the same developer? The same architectural style? A fence around it? When the place is mapped as an area, you can easily see the predominant landuse (or mixed character) by looking at the landuse inside.
Wetherington is a large gated community in Ohio with over 1,300 residents.
By the way, this is a good demonstration of what should not be done: include the delimiting roads. Or are there gates at the interstate where you enter and exit the community?
As a mapper, it isn’t for me to judge the ideology that produces this landuse. Urban planners have been discouraging car-centric suburban development for generations, but real estate developers are unfazed. They are in charge, and I can observe that they’ve built homogeneous landuse. If this is bad urban planning, let the map be a testament to that. Sometimes an old subdivision does get redeveloped, in which case the landuse area gets broken up and renamed, in the real world as in our world.
If you’re referring to the boundary relation I highlighted in that screenshot, this is a census-designated place. A CDP represents a populated place with name and a certain population density. Its boundaries would be defined in terms of roads among other things – yes, even Interstates. The U.S. community has always had an uneasy relationship with the CDP boundaries, because they don’t really correspond to anything on the ground. In some cases, the extent may not even align completely with what the name refers to according to locals. I bring them up here to show that place areas come with their own challenges.
The landuse area corresponds much more closely to the residential development, though it also connects to some adjoining roadways. Indeed, the local community used to join landuse areas to roadways as a rule, based on essentially the same reasoning that I described in this thread about boundaries, but applied to property lines. We’ve since abandoned this approach, but there are still a great many landuse areas to detach from the roadway and move to… well, no one can agree what to move it to, but something away from the roadway.
Is it a neighborhood? Maybe by some definition of neighborhood, but terms from traditional place hierarchies like hamlet/village/town/city or neighborhood/quarter/suburb are very difficult to apply meaningfully to American suburbia or even country-living developments like Lake Waynoka, which after all are designed to provide an artificial experience.
Small aside, people are disagreeing here about when, if at all, named landuse areas are appropriate, but no one objected when I suggested documenting on the wiki how to put the node and the area for a place into a relation, so I’ve gone ahead and done that.
oh yes, absolutely, what I meant was that while it may look in your region as if it is always like this, it may be different in other places, and if we settled on named landuse as the way to map these, it would create problems in these other areas, as the same or similar thing would probably have to be mapped quite differently.
Sure, I’ve already presented this as a tradeoff earlier. A named landuse area would apply in most of the situations I’ve described, whereas a place area would be more appropriate for a more organic or less rigid settlement pattern, or simply a place node if the extent isn’t so obvious. I just felt the need to rebut what seemed to be a suggestion that landuse areas could be replaced by place areas even for these textbook suburban developments.
