What's better: "building yard", "maintenance yard" or something else?

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@SafetyIng Based on your last reply, and your earlier post from October 29th, I think this discussion ultimately boils down to a fundamental disagreement about what constitutes an “industrial” use vs. “commercial”. I’m not sure if it’s just a personal difference, or a language/cultural difference between the Germanosphere and the Anglosphere.

To me—Canadian, English-speaker at home—a roofing company’s office usually is in an industrial landuse. Many if not most building trades’ offices are but a few rooms in a larger industrial (warehouse/workshop) building, located in a greater industrial park. In fact here it would be quite rare to find a roofing company’s offices located in a commercial (office) building; typically only the largest construction firms would have corporate offices in a commercial building.

For me, there’s no confusion or doubt that a Bauhof is just a depot, which is an industrial land use. Similarly a logistics warehouse is an industrial use.

For you and other German-speakers the distinction seems to be that you would say industrial lands are areas where a product or good is made, i.e. factories. If there are no goods produced, it is therefore not an industrial use.

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This is exactly the case. I have addressed this issue earlier (Post #16) and I believe this would be well worth to be discussed in a separate topic to clarify the difference. This would help to stop the time and again rising discussions specially in the german subforum about the correct use of “industrial” and “commercial”. I will probably go for it as soon as we came to an agreement about the “Bauhof” issue.

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I think it’s the crux of the issue. Going back and re-reading the (translated) thread on the German forum, the only reason it seems it was ever contemplated to create some other “building yard”/“maintenance yard”/etc tag is because many contributors don’t see a Bauhof—or anything even remotely resembling such a thing—fitting in any landuse=* tag.

(Whereas, again, to me it seems patently obvious it’s landuse=industrial, industrial=depot, and you can clarify the exact purpose of the depot with operator=*, operator:type=*, or just description=*, and… it doesn’t need to be anymore complicated than that. :man_shrugging:)

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@hoserab Okay, we seem to be on to something.

I’m familiar with the classic German distinction between four groups:
From the secondary sector: industry and manufacturing (“Industrie und verarbeitendes Gewerbe”) and crafts (“Handwerk”) as well as from the tertiary sector retail (“Handel”) and services (“Dienstleistung”).

Industry: Commercial extraction, processing and further processing of raw materials or intermediate products into material goods (the classic term for Germans would of course be the car industry, but also chemicals, the food industry, etc.)
=> landuse=industrial

Craft: This is actually self-explanatory, but it is not an industry, so in Germany it is more likely to be landuse=commercial

Trade: Also self-explanatory, includes everything that primarily involves the sale of goods

Services: Is all activities that do not produce goods, e.g. transport, banking and insurance, real estate and housing. If you also include parts of the quaternary sector: IT, consulting: engineers, lawyers, business consultants, tax consultants, etc.

Classically, a distinction is also made in German spatial planning between “industry” and “commerce” in the sense of manufacturing companies (“industry”) and craft and service companies (“commerce”). This means that there are industrial areas and commercial areas. I believe this distinction from German construction planning is what makes this understanding so important.

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This is analogous to the American distinction between heavy and light industrial landuse that I mentioned earlier, but the common refrain to that reasoning has always been that we don’t map zoning. Ironically, in places that have zoning schemes, conventional landuse maps and zoning maps are one and the same.

The actual reason we don’t map zoning is that we shouldn’t be beholden to a local planning council’s notion of what a parcel of land ought to be despite what’s on the ground. And of course each jurisdiction has a different set of official zoning designations that would be impossible to slot into a single one-size-fits-all tagging scheme. But a distinction between heavy and light industrial (or “quasi-industrial”) landuse seems to be a common theme among urban planning schemes globally.

That said, I think introducing a new landuse category, for land of a not-quite-industrial character, would require a lot of thought, because landuse=industrial is so entrenched in software and so prevalent in the database. These depots may be one argument in favor of a new category but we’d probably need a more compelling case as to why the current system falls short of facilitating accurate cartography and analysis.

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SafetyIng, re

So what would you call an area such as this https://maps.app.goo.gl/kzzNMruijtSB2prk7 (apologies for the G view - there are no other streetview images available :cry:)

In Australia, that is classified as “light industrial”, & indeed, this area’s name is Burleigh Gardens Industrial Estate.

As you can see, it is mainly what we refer to as factory units, occupied by a wide variety of businesses, that are frequently making / repackaging goods for onwards supply to retailers, but also sometimes selling directly themself. There are also motor mechanics, solar PV businesses, there’s a bread factory around the corner & so on.

So would you call that “industrial”, & if not, what would it be?

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Thanks to @Fizzie41 @hoserab @Minh_Nguyen for your input to this issue which confirms what I have tried to draft in post #16. For clarification I’ll try to give a summary about the “industrial/commercial landuse” issue from the german pov:

The english terms “industry/industrial” and “commerce/commercial” are usually understood as a translation of the german terms “Industrie/industriell” and “Gewerbe/gewerblich”. This is a basic error which has leading to several time consuming debates about the use of the landuse values “industrial” and “commercial” in the german subforum.

The german terms:

The term “Gewerbe” is the most generic economic term and covers all business activities of trade, craft, manufacturing and traffic. As such it is definitely not the 1:1 translation of “commerce”. As top generic term it is more related to the english “industry”, being used for all branches of economic activities.

“Industrie” is a subset of “Gewerbe”, being used for large scale manufacturing of goods and quite precisely translated as “manufacturing industry”. As such an “Industriegebiet” is an area provided exclusively for manufacturing industries.

“Handwerk” is a subset of “Gewerbe”, describing business creating/repairing/servicing things by manual work and is translated as “craft”. Craft business is usually located in an area called “Gewerbegebiet”.

“Handel” is a subset of “Gewerbe”, describing all trading activities, translated as “trade”. Large scale trade is usually located in a “Gewerbegebiet”, small retail shops in urban shopping areas.

Due to these facts “Gewerbegebiet” (which describes an area for “Gewerbe”) can be translated as “industrial area” or “commercial area” or “trade area” (example) because all these activities are covered by the term “Gewerbe”.

The english terms:

The other way round “industry” has a more widespread meaning than just large scale manufacturing and an industrial area or estate can house factories, as well as craft business, workshops, warehousing and the like. As such it covers the german terms of “Industriegebiet” as well as most of “Gewerbegebiet”.

“Commerce” describes all economic activities being related to trade, including trade itself, but also advertising, financing, insurance, storage, distribution etc. As such it cannot be translated as “Gewerbe” because it just covers a part of the latter. To my knowledge there is no 1:1 translation of “commerce”. Translating the scope of activities would result in “Handel und alle damit verbundenen geschäftlichen Aktivitäten”.

tl:dr

“Industriegebiet” is not a 1:1 translation of landuse=industrial. “Industrial” also includes business activities which in german are associated with “Gewerbegebiet”, like craft, warehousing, workshops etc.

“Gewerbegebiet” is not a 1:1 translation of landuse=commercial. “Commercial” is restricted to trade and all other business activities related to trade and does not include craft businesses which are also part of “Gewerbe”.

The german and english terms overlap each other in parts, but not completely. Therefore it would be helpful to come to a consensus if the tags landuse=industrial and landuse=commercial should be used in Germany according the their meaning in english or if they should be used as translation of “Industriegebiet” and “Gewerbegebiet” which is something substantially different.

I would appreciate your comments before we discuss this issue once again in the german subforum.

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To complete the above issue I want point out that some activities apparently are not clearly assigned either to be “commercial” or “industrial”. Transport, storage and distribution of trading goods are all trade related and therefore part of commercial activities as per definition. Nevertheless transport, warehousing and other storage are understood as industrial (light industrial). It would be helpful if someone could clarify this discrepancy.

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Perhaps light industry is less disruptive to the environment than heavy industry? Transport, logistics and warehousing (these terms are intertwined) operated by trucks are considered light industry because of their impact on the environment and human life. Transport, logistics and warehousing are characterised by: 24/7/365 operation; adverse environmental impact in terms of noise, exhaust fumes, shift work; handling of dangerous goods (ADR); the same means of transport can perform work for different sectors of the economy, such as commerce, the military, automotive, agriculture, food processing, waste transport, etc.
As an integral part of industry, logistics, transport and warehousing is one element of any country’s military capability (In the sense of mainly defensive, stabilization capabilities).

What is the case with logistics and transport: river, sea, rail, air and even space. I guess in each of these cases we are dealing with industry, not commerce… ?

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Back on topic, as we have drifted off a bit.
I think that the “building yard”, “maintenance yard” area could have its own tagging. I believe that due to the function of the area is closer to the commercial area (this is how I labelled the area at one time - I don’t know if rightly so), however, as noted earlier it is often tagged as industrial (so maybe this is a better tag).

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This may be throwing a monkey wrench into things here, confusing matters more. I have tagged (and seen tagged) with landuse=industrial the parcels of land which surround things as diverse as power substations, water towers, pumping stations for aqueducts and other infrastructure technological components. Whether or not this is widespread in your area, I don’t know, but it is done in North America. It is because the landuse=industrial tag is widely-inclusive and includes a “corporation yard” (I and many fellow Americans are familiar with this across the USA, especially as we live in cities that as municipal, corporate bodies according to state constitution, law, et cetera, must create space for and use), industrial space to park trucks, erect pumping stations, transform electricity, provide power co-generation…and so on.

Such a thing might have a parcel of land surrounding it tagged landuse=industrial (even if it is surrounded by meadows full of flowers and butterflies) because that tag doesn’t simply mean “factories” (although it could and does in a narrow sense, so it is appropriate to tag the land surrounding factories with this tag). Specifically, a “bauhof” or depot (a more appropriately British English translation) leads to building=depot being tagged on a building polygon as well as landuse=industrial possibly being on the surrounding landuse polygon.

Beyond that, we do get lost in weeds somewhat with “the way we do and name things around here” and the concomitant search for a good British English tag equivalent for something that might diverge from the rather sparse two-tag conventions I note above.

There are also “mixed-use” (commercial, industrial, residential, sometimes in one building) on land uses or buildings.