Place classification - town vs suburb, remote rural areas, how does a CDP relate to place

[willkmis]

@Minh_Nguyen

But these places have also been a frequent source of negative feedback from cartographers, because it’s just… loud compared to other parts of the country. And then there’s New England.

I’m not sure I follow. Can you point me to a region of the US where place=city is not defined roughly as “suburbs” >80k or so in population that are nonetheless not one of the couple of principal cities in the metro area? I can only find locations that do seem to conform to roughly that guideline: Node: ‪Santa Monica‬ (‪1792515162‬) | OpenStreetMap, Node: ‪Peoria‬ (‪1340670207‬) | OpenStreetMap, Node: ‪Thornton‬ (‪151412991‬) | OpenStreetMap, Node: ‪Independence‬ (‪151407399‬) | OpenStreetMap, Node: ‪Gary‬ (‪153543923‬) | OpenStreetMap, Node: ‪Irving‬ (‪4400006133‬) | OpenStreetMap, Node: ‪Marietta‬ (‪2548821609‬) | OpenStreetMap, Node: ‪Bethesda‬ (‪158248181‬) | OpenStreetMap, Node: ‪Elizabeth‬ (‪158814887‬) | OpenStreetMap, Node: ‪Lynn‬ (‪158822289‬) | OpenStreetMap, Node: ‪Pontiac‬ (‪154148875‬) | OpenStreetMap

I can’t vouch that all of these are correct, and some of them have indeed toggled over the years, but in general I guess I don’t see what is so different between California/the coasts and other parts of the country? It seems like tagging these sorts of places as cities is a fairly reliable nationwide practice, and all of these regions also tag smaller suburban settlements as towns.

@Minh_Nguyen

A city is any incorporated place or CDP with over 10,000 residents, but only if it is an anchor city of a metropolitan area or a suburb of a larger city. An incorporated place of between 10,000 and 50,000 that isn’t a suburb would be place=town, regardless of density or geographical prominence.

The preference for suburbia would clearly depart from most mappers’ and data consumers’ expectations. Some regions apparently follow this definition today, deliberately or accidentally, but I think this is no more usable than the regions where every legally designated city has been promoted to place=city.

Can you clarify what you mean by “the preference for suburbia”? As in, classifying “major suburbs” as place=city? Or do you mean not classifying small (pop < 50k), isolated places as place=city? I’m a little mixed up by your definition here as well, it looks like it claims that an incorporated place that is the center of a metropolitan area between 10 and 50k is both a city and a town, and that one that’s not the central place is always a city? I think it’s quite the opposite right now in the database: the prevailing bar for places tagged city in major metro areas is higher than in more rural regions, more like 80k people, at least where I checked (counter examples welcome). If it was 10k, the LA basin would have a lot more than 29 cities, for example. So I don’t think any region currently follows the above definition.

In general, I am fine with tagging relatively small isolated settlements as place=city if they’re very important regionally, as long as they have some minimum of “major” services available (spitballing but, hospital, movie theater, multiple neighborhoods/major retail districts, etc? But towns probably have these in some regions too). Maybe a rule of thumb could be, is it a highway=trunk destination? I also agree that what a local government defines itself as/whether one exists is almost always irrelevant to what OSM place tagging somewhere should have.

But I do think there’s room for many large “suburbs” to be tagged as cities in major metro areas. Taking LA as the extreme example of a decentralized urban area, I guess I just don’t see how retagging Santa Monica (population 90,000) or Pasadena (population 130,000) as towns, the same as El Segundo (population 16,000) but differently than Glendale (population 200,000), is objectively better/more useful/more in line with someone’s expectations than current practice.