This year, the Dutch community once more reassessed the village_green issue. The basic question was: how do we recognize “true village_greens”? That is, an area matching the GB-defintion close enough.
No single attribute was decisive, we just looked at name, location, appearance, history, whatever we could find. E.g. the name Brink for a central area in a village (or an ex-village within a city) is not uncommon. A brink (among other names such as “meent”, “es” and a few others) was a designated area in or near a village center that everyone could use for e.g. assembling cows or horses for the weekly market. Enough such areas still exist in one form or another, that we think it’s valuable to map them as such, if we can find verifiable evidence.
The major problem was, that the tag landuse=village_green has been misinterpreted massively as "stadsgroen"or “gemeentegroen” which means municipal greenery.
Some mappers were cleaning this mess up gradually, at the local level. Now we have coördinated all efforts and cleaned it up country-wide. We have now 65 village greens, all with a name, not too small, which we think deserve the title of “village green”.
All other areas have been retagged as grass, grass with some trees, forest/wood, park, garden, sports areas, scrub.
The bulk of the false village_greens, however, were areas of shrubs, brushes, hedge areas, mainly used as an urban landscaping method and as separators on parking lots, highway areas, highway junctions, roundabouts.
These have now been retagged as areas of natural=shrubbery.
Before the operation, we had discussed the use of natural=greenery, or landcover=greenery. Greenery being the term for an area with mixed or unknown cityscaping vegetation. As it turns out, in my experience, almost all areas could easily be mapped as grass or shrubbery with sparse trees or tree rows mapped separately on them. If there are many trees on it, it’s forest/wood.
I am very happy with the result!