Talk:Tag:place=borough

Please deprecate this tag

I don't know when this was discussed and approved, but it is not used in significant numbers, and it doesn't seem to be a good and consistent way using place to represent administrative units. We already have widely established tagging with boundary=administrative and admin_level=* for administrative units, so the place doesn't seem to add anything more to it. I propose to deprecate the tag. Do not use it. --Dieterdreist (talk) 08:20, 21 October 2019 (UTC)

Agreed. There is no need for additional place tags: place=suburb / quarter / neighborhood are more than enough for parts of cities or towns, and if a borough is an administrative unit, then it can be mapped with boundary=administrative + admin_level=*. --Jeisenbe (talk) 01:02, 29 October 2019 (UTC)

I came here trying to find out if there was another level in addition to suburb/quarter/neighbourhood. The problem I've run into is that place=neighbourhood renders smaller than features in the neighbourhood, like parks and school grounds. So, I've been tagging neighbourhoods as quarters and tagging groups of neighbourhoods as suburbs. This makes those two levels render at appropriate sizes, but it leaves me with no way to tag suburbs. I notice that some places tag their largest city subdivisions with place=town; but that won't work for Canada where place=town is only used for incorporated areas with their own government. --Arctic.gnome (talk) 16:17, 27 November 2019 (UTC)

If you are talking about the current rendering on the main style of openstreetmap.org please discuss this at https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues but don't change you way of mapping because of a certain rendering style. It is correct to use place=neighbourhood for the smallest places in a city (neighborhoods), place=suburb for the largest divisions of a city, and place=quarter as another layer in between neighborhoods and "suburbs" in size. I agree that place=town should only be used for places that are considered separate from the main city - this does not mean that they need their own municipaity, but they are their one centre at least locally. --Jeisenbe (talk) 07:49, 10 December 2019 (UTC)

I think this tag serves a useful purpose still but is problematic in it's definition as "administrative" units. I see boundary=administrative + admin_level=* which are for strictly administrative regions as independent to place=* which is about named places. Named places can exist in use on the ground without actually being administrative units and therefore this tag serves a useful purpose. For example in Sydney (which is a city) there are smaller named regions within Sydney that group the even smaller named suburbs, these named regions fit place=borough as city units but aren't administrative at all and don't fit into boundary=administrative. --Aharvey (talk) 04:15, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

Yes, if we remove the word “administrative” then this could be used to map settlement parts that are bigger than osm suburbs (groups of suburbs or similar), and this could be useful in some areas. My suggestion to not use the tag was in reference to using it for administrative units. —Dieterdreist (talk) 08:13, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

I added to the page its actual usage, which seems to be dominated by Pennsylvania, USA and Galicia, Spain (by imports it seems). In addition these usages are quite different than what I would probably think of as a borough (I'm thinking boroughs in New York City or London) --Popball (talk) 16:25, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

Allow use on relations

The infobox suggests this tag can't be used on relations but taginfo shows this is in use, even more so than on ways. We should allow this tag on relations potentially with type=place. --Aharvey (talk) 04:16, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

There is an issue with place=* being duplicated in boundary=administrative in general. --- Kovposch (talk) 02:44, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

Yes, maybe not in general, but in many areas and with many place values. —Dieterdreist (talk) 08:04, 10 May 2022 (UTC)