The usage of place=municipality is so different across regions and across users that I feel like there should be more info on it on the wiki page. I’ve written a draft for an updated version.
What do people think of the draft?
Can someone explain to me why the current wiki page says “urban administrative division”? (Not all languages have the word “urban” there on their wikis.) I think most instances of place=municipality nodes are in rural areas. Usually, there’s a village in it, but sometimes it’s really just scattered buildings. Maybe a native English speaker can provide more insight – it’s possible that the word municipality in English is just understood differently than the supposed translations comuna, kommun, Gemeinde etc.
Is there any country where the local community wants urban municipalites to be tagged with place=municipality nodes?
I don’t want to start lengthy discussions in this thread about which countries should go in which of the 3 rows in the Usage by country table. Think of the lists of countries as examples. The wiki can always be amended later.
For reference, the last international thread about this tag was this one.
For 1: Seems like a reasonable draft, greatly improving the existing wiki page of the tag.
For 3: In Greece we don’t have such distinction nowadays between rural and urban municipalities (we used to in some sort till 2010), so I can’t say something for that part. We don’t even use the place=municipality tag, yet, but if we did I assume it would be in the administrative relations only, as we don’t create nodes for the labels.
The draft retains the wording from the current page about “corporate status” which I suspect may in turn come from wikipedia. I’m not sure what that means and I wonder if many readers will understand it, and if it is even meaningful for the countries where this tag is widely used in OSM.
Similar to what @jimkats said about Greece, municipalities (“municipios”) in Spain are not particularly urban or rural - the whole territory (in most regions) is divided into municipalities. But the tag is not really used anyway - municipalities are normally tagged as admin level 8, with no tag specifically saying they are municipalities.
In American English, “municipality” is an umbrella term for any incorporated place that corresponds to a populated place. However, I think OSM got place=municipality from a Romance language such as Spanish. A municipio is pretty much the opposite. I figure it came from an old notion that every boundary has to correspond to a place=*.
In the U.S., place=municipality would be for things like New England towns or Midwestern townships. These are generally unincorporated, with exceptions in some states. Townships can be rural or urban.
That said, there’s also a soft consensus among the local community not to bother with place points for these space-filling, complete partitions of broader administrative areas, and that complete coverage of place=* on boundaries is pointless because of conceptual mismatches. So that leaves pretty much nowhere to use this tag, except perhaps as a placeholder so that no one tries to create a place=town node for something legally called a “town”.
The same applies in Brazil. Most municipalities here have both urban and rural areas, and many have a legally defined boundary between the two areas (often an outdated one). Municipalities within major metropolitan regions may sometimes be exclusively urban, forming part of the larger conurbation, though they typically had a rural area prior to the metropolis’s expansion. Our least populous municipality, with 833 inhabitants, has a tiny urban core, with the remainder of its territory being predominantly rural.
In Finland all land belongs to some municipality. All municipalities have at least some town-like place that is the administrative center. Many have more than one, as old smaller municipalities have merged to share the administrative burden.
But now that I really look, there are a number of municipalities that are just never rendered on Carto, because their admin centre(s) have a completely different name than the municipality itself.
In these situations, perhaps place=municipality could be used, and understood as analogous to place=country?
For Austria, the country is divided into province - district - municipality with admin relations and borders for each. There are a few exceptions, some towns at district level and the capital as province.
There are a handful of place=municipality, haven’t reviewed them yet, but my guess is these are labels when there is no settlement named the same as the municipality. They may or may not be needed in the future.
The names of a boundary relation and its admin_centre member would only ever match by coincidence. After all, the admin_centre member represents a different place than the boundary relation. It doesn’t have anything to do with why the municipality goes unlabeled in OSM Carto, since that renderer considers place=* points independently of any relations. OSM Carto also labels the boundary relation at the centroid and along the edges, regardless of any member node.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding something or something gets lost between cultural expectations. Finland has only one type of regional administration that would correspond to English words like town, municipality, city etc. Two different Finnish words can be used, but the legal meaning is exactly the same. Typically each of these contains 1 or more urban areas and the surrounding countryside, sea areas etc.
These are mapped as a relation with admin_level=8. A very simple case here:
Below are the relations for two municipalities in Finland, where multiple older municipalities have merged into one, and the resulting new municipality has a name that doesn’t correspond to any of the older municipalities or urban settlements in them.
The names on those relations are how people would normally refer to these areas. I don’t see these names rendered on Carto, except along the border (small and hard to see text that only appears at z14). Shortbread renders the name on the second one but not the first.
On Finnish maps, the names of those relations are the most prominent name shown, e.g.
National Land Survey maps show the municipality name in larger font:
A commercial service (Fonecta) uses the municipality name on top of the main admin centre. The other urban settlements in this municipality get their names rendered at higher zoom, but Pöytyä (name of municipality) is used instead of Riihikoski (name of the main admin centre) at almost all zoom levels.
Nederland does not use place=municipality. Municipalities in Nederland are boundaries admin_level 8, there is complete coverage of the country.
Many municipalities are named differently than the cities, villages and townships within them, e.g. I live in Nieuwerkerk aan de IJssel which, together with Moordrecht, Zevenhuizen, Moerkapelle, Oud Verlaat and Cortelande, forms the municipality “Zuidplas”.
Most municipalities in Nederland are a mix of urban and rural areas.
Switzerland is similar to many of the already mentioned countries: municipalities are the base administrative entity (only the largest urban municipalities will have sub-divisions), and as a rule contain one or more settlements (yes there’s a handful of exceptions because there are some statistical-only ones). Some have the same name as their administrative centre, some don’t, in day to day use people tend to refer to the actual places/settlements.There’s just a tiny use of place=municipality.
Swisstopo seems to render municipalities more prominently than their constituent places in any case*, OSM based maps tend to do that based on scale. Then there’s an additional complication to all of this because the official municipality names are disambiguated and most of the time (yes there are exceptions) those disambiguations are not used locally. In such cases we use the un-disambiguated place object as the admin_centre.
And if that wasn’t complicated enough, there are roughly 4’100 postal cities (there are ~2’200 municipalities), which may or may not be colloquially used, that we currently only model in/with addresses, as while they are actually areas, they currently can’t be modelled with OSM postal_code boundaries without causing lots of issues.
* embarrassingly I just noticed a case in a neighbouring municipality were they don’t, but there are multiple weird things about that including not using the actual official name, so might just be an error.
It seems to be quite a country-specific tag and it seems that the vast majority of instances are in a handful of countries: Tags | OpenStreetMap Taginfo
Germany has per-state rules so there are some differences across Germany but in general a municipality contains multiple populated places which may or may not have grown together and they also may or may not be separated in further districts with their own representative/mayor. Some states (like my home state RLP) use the Verbandsgemeinde concept (a collective of municipalities) which further tie legal entities and physical locations together (and it also guarantees that each place gets its own mayor[1]).
I myself and many others use place=municipality primarily for collective municipalities which are more defined as collective group of villages and small towns and omit it when the municipality contains only place or there’s a clearly central landmass with multiple place=suburb. Whether the municipality shares the name or not doesn’t matter and isn’t specified on the German wiki either.
Barring some exceptions like in double-villages but these are not the rule ↩︎
The reason why I asked my 3rd question is that I wanted to know if this part of the wiki page is appropriately written:
For municipalities mostly covering rural land, the geometric center is used. For urban municipalities, the position can be near a central square, a central administrative or religious building or a central road junction.
I was wondering if maybe there are places out there where place=municipality is used for towns where the municipal boundaries line up with the town’s boundaries or for districts of a larger metropolitan area. Usually, all such places would be labelled with place=town/city afaIk.
But from what I’m gathering here, the geometric center is always the right position to choose for place=municipality, except (maybe) in the case of very unshapely municipal boundaries.
As for Germany, it might be best to add a new row to the table for it if the guidelines there are so complicated.
I don’t know if this belongs here, how does one keep corporate municipality border from being included in the address as resolved by nominatim? these border polygons doesn’t fit anywhere in the address (and mustn’t), being almost similar to parliamentary polygons.
@kadiwa this possibly what it means by corporate status, an entity that takes care of garbage,services, permits, planning etc etc. for a designated area. For us in Malaysia, municipals take care of running cities/big towns (and other wannabe ‘cities’ - towns looking for extra $$$ ), while district services take care of the rest.
I think that different places will have different and sometimes very different arrangements and responsibilities for municipalities.
I thought it might be useful to look for some definitions of “municipal” and “municipality”.
“Municipal means relating to a city, town, or local government.”
“Municipal means associated with or belonging to a city or town that has its own local government.”
“A municipality is a town, city, or local district that has a legal identity and its own local government.”
“A municipality is usually a single administrative division having corporate status and powers of self-government or jurisdiction as granted by national and regional laws to which it is subordinate. The term municipality may also mean the governing body of a given municipality. A municipality is a general-purpose administrative subdivision, as opposed to a special-purpose district.”
I think that while the word is strongly associated with urban places, that doesn’t mean that it only applies to those places. In an urban area, municipal waste collection is a commonly observed activity. However, it is almost invisible in rural areas. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen or that it isn’t a municipal service, just that the activity is less observed in rural areas - fewer people live there, so there are fewer people who put out their bins and fewer people to see those bins.
If we have a municipal park or municipal library, that will often be put where it is most useful to people - in or adjacent to a town. That doesn’t mean it can’t be in a more rural area.
I think that key parts of the above definitions are separate legal identity and its own government. To do that, it should have defined borders.
The separate legal identity is usually granted by some higher government level, whether constitutionally or legislatively. However, I imagine there are some that are de facto entities that have evolved and/or been around ‘forever’ or have some other basis. That a place is a town or (historical?) administrative entity is insufficient on their own.
I think removing the reference to “urban” is okay, as it is being used for both rural and urban municipalities (at least in how it’s used in Australia).
Usage on boundaries
In many places, the tag place=municipality has been added to boundary=administrative relations to indicate that they represent municipalities. However, some people consider other tags like border_type=* (or other locally preferred tags) to be better suited for this. Keep in mind that the place=* key does not indicate an official designation.
+1 to this, it describes the current status well.
Therefore, the placement of a place=municipality node is often arbitrary, conventionally at the centroid of the boundary.
I would update this to say, that sometimes there is no place=municipality node added at all for a place=municipality added to a boundary relation.
