Add rendering for boundary=protected_area; class 21

I would like to see rendering for boundary=protected_area class 21 : Community life: religious, sacred areas, associative locations, recreation.

Rendering for this tag was heavily discussed in #603 , however, rendering was not added for this class. Discussion for different styles for different classes also in #3656

I appreciate class 21 is a diverse class covering a range of OSM features. In my instance, it has been used to tag a "town green" - a legally protected space for recreational use (in the UK). The land is not, however, a park or recreational area in the sense that it is not managed by a local authority.

Whilst it shares the same legal protection as a "village green" their characteristics are very different. Additionally, "village green" is a legal status rather than a land use. It seems that current examples of "village green" should really use the boundary=protected_area schema.

Issues: The name of the area is not rendered. The boundary of the area is not rendered.

Suggestions: Render the name Render the boundary. In my example, a green boundary (e.g. nature reserve or park) works but I appreciate it may not for other members of this class (e.g. religious).

Capture

I believe this is the link to the feature?

Freeman's Woods: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/181597678

It is the patch of woodland and the grass area inside, in the screenshot from the original post.

Tags: boundary = protected_area name = Freeman's Woods note = Application for Town Green (common land) granted by Lancashire County Council on 2020-02-12: https://council.lancashire.gov.uk/ieListDocuments.aspx?CId=1596&MId=10738&Ver=4 protect_class = 21 protection_title = common protection_title2 = town_green start_date = 2020-02-10

For this particular example, the current rendering of the woodland area and the patch of grass is a good representation of the actual features on the ground at this location. But I wonder - is "Freeman's Wood" also the commonly-used name for the natural=wood feature which makes up most of this area?

Looking at the tag protect_class=21, this includes a wide variety of cultural features:

"Social-protected-area - Important social interests. Visualize sociopolitical assets: " "21 - Community life: religious, sacred areas, associative locations, recreation"

That's a very wide variety of features: sacred sites and recreational locations are not very similar. I'm not sure what "associative locations" means: perhaps this is something about a place for community gatherings?

It would not be appropriate to render these features the same as national parks or nature reserves.

I believe this is the link to the feature?

Indeed. Apologies I linked to my edit, rather than the feature itself.

But I wonder - is "Freeman's Wood" also the commonly-used name for the natural=wood feature which makes up most of this area?

The name covers the whole bounded area - the wood and the grass area. Though this is, of course, specific to my example. Other areas might be totally different. The Wiki suggests some US state parks make use of this tag also.

It would not be appropriate to render these features the same as national parks or nature reserves.

Agreed - the class is diverse and not all members should be rendered as national parks/nature reserves.

Is there a more generic "community" colour that could be used for the boundary?

I appreciate class 21 is a diverse class covering a range of OSM features.

In my example, a green boundary (e.g. nature reserve or park) works but I appreciate it may not for other members of this class

It sounds like what the tag is used for varies too much to be able to render it with one rendering.

There is a proposal to update the sub-tagging for boundary=protected_area, to fix problems like the use of numbers instead of English words, and the mixing of different features in one group (sacred religious sites and recreational areas should not be the same feature):

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposal:_Named_protection_class_for_protected_areas

That would provide separate tags for protection_class=recreation which might be appropriate for some areas like "commons" in England (though I'm not certain if your particular example is protected for recreation or not?), and "National / State recreation areas" in North America. This is much clearer than protect_class=21, and more specific since it excludes religious / sacred areas.

Also note that we previously removed the rendering of leisure=common which used to be rendered as a green area, like grass or a garden. That was the old usual tag for "common land" in England, but was not well defined and is rather England-specific, so was not appropriate to render like a garden or grass.

It sounds like what the tag is used for varies too much to be able to render it with one rendering.

Two naive questions:

Is there a "community" -eque colour scheme in use for other "community" related items/areas on the carto map?
If not, could we not at least render the name and boundary in a non-descript colour (i.e. just black text and a black/grey line for the boundary)?

Otherwise I feel like we're encouraging mapping for the renderer (e.g. adding other tags such as "park" or "recreation ground") or the map is missing important community sites.

That would provide separate tags for protection_class=recreation which might be appropriate for some areas like "commons" in England (though I'm not certain if your particular example is protected for recreation or not?), and "National / State recreation areas" in North America. This is much clearer than protect_class=21, and more specific since it excludes religious / sacred areas.

This would certainly make this issue easier to solve.

Yes, the area is legally protected for recreation. The problem is that the recreation is more of the form of hiking/bird watching/children building dens etc, rather than ball games etc. (and so the recreation ground tag is not appropriate) and the area is not really maintained like a park is (sometimes the local authority/municipality don't even own the land).

Also note that we previously removed the rendering of leisure=common which used to be rendered as a green area, like grass or a garden. That was the old usual tag for "common land" in England, but was not well defined and is rather England-specific, so was not appropriate to render like a garden or grass.

Yes, I noted that. It's a shame to see this removed but I understand that the tag was being misused outside of the UK. Village Greens, Town Greens, Commons etc are British legal terms that essentially all mean the same thing - areas of land (that can have various characteristics) that are legally protected for public use.

That's why the protected_class system works well - we can easily fit local/national schemes into it... so long as they're rendered.

On Sun, Apr 5, 2020 at 6:18 AM Caseyb87 notifications@github.com wrote:

It sounds like what the tag is used for varies too much to be able to render it with one rendering.

Not quite, exactly. The last time I looked at the objects, protect_class=21 was used extensively for recreation areas. It particularly is used to solve the problem of tagging the ones in North America and Australia that comprise a mix of developed facilities (playing fields, picnic grounds, swimming beaches and the like) and back-country areas; neither 'nature reserve', nor 'recreation ground', nor 'park' is really appropriate to these. In practice, 21 means 'land protected for recreational uses; land use often mixed between "nature reserve", "park", "recreation ground", "historic site", and occasionally specific features such as "beach" and even "golf course".'

The typical US 'state park' is just such a mixed-use thing, but all of the recreational features share a common boundary, and a name, and locals will expect to see the named entity on a map. It's a concept that's painfully hard to express in UK English, because the UK plans its land use differently, and simply doesn't have such things.

There are non-recreational protect_class=21 areas that have been tagged, but if memory serves, no more than a couple of dozen worldwide. (The last time I checked, a few ancient churches accounted for most of these.)

Two naive questions:

Is there a "community" -eque colour scheme in use for other "community" related items/areas on the carto map?

If not, could we not at least render the name and boundary in a non-descript colour (i.e. just black text and a black/grey line for the boundary)?

Otherwise I feel like we're encouraging mapping for the renderer (e.g. adding other tags such as "park" or "recreation ground") or the map is missing important community sites.

The only reason that a lot of these sites aren't missing from the map is that those of us who curate them also over-tag with marginally-appropriate tagging. The practice is 'tagging for the renderer', if you will, but not committing the real sin of 'lying to the renderer'. Rather, it's simply using over-broad tagging because more-precise tagging is not yet rendered.

I'm satisfied with the practice for the most part, except for the fact that we lack a concept of 'recreation area, with a mixture of uses often encompassing bot back-country (nature reserve) and front-country (recreation ground, campground, park, beach, golf course, ...) features.' which is a common land use pattern for recreational lands in the US. I have heard at length from mappers who claim that the only correct way to map such a feature is to break it up and map the individual land uses. Following this advice loses the fact that the uses are all enclosed within a common boundary and share a common name. The locals will expect to see that common boundary and common name rendered. For this reason, the usual, albeit controversial, approach is to tag the whole area with what appears to be the predominant use.

I don't demand a distinctive rendering for 'mixed use recreation,' but it would be really nice to have some rendering, rather than have to fudge the tagging like this.

(Feel free to stop reading here: from here on, I'm delving into details.)

Perhaps the thorniest example that I'm familiar with is Bear Mountain State Park https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6467468 (and the coterminuous Harriman https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/4080499 and Sterling Forest https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6437484 State Parks. All are administered together; the separate naming is a historical artefact). An outing there could be a sedate picnic by Hessian Lake with a ride on the carousel; a luxurious brunch and spa treatment at the Bear Mountain Inn, a swim in Lake Welch, or a pick-up ball game on one of the playing fields. But it could also be a drive to check out the view atop Bear Mountain; climbing Bear Mountain afoot on trails ranging from a broad footway with granite stairs in all the steep parts, to a narrow, rocky path with some rock scrambling; a day hike to explore the ghost town Doodletown; techincal rock climbing at The Powerlinez; car camping at Lake Tiorati; or a strenuous three-day backpack on some of the park's 300+ km of trails. The tagging of 'nature reserve' is wrong, but there's nothing better. (For this specific example, I'd consider 'national park', but concede that the ice is thin.) The land use is higgledy-piggledy. There are youth camps, swimming beaches, MTB courses, and what-have-you sprinkled throughout, all embedded in second-growth forest in what, a century ago, was an industrial wasteland. Despite the heterogeneity, 'Bear Mountain State Park' or 'Harriman State Park' are what the locals will look for first on a map, and be puzzled not to see them; 'nature reserve' is the nearest thing to the truth.

I can give a plethora of other specific examples from New York State, where I actively curate such things. I've lived in several, diverse, other states (New Hampshire, Illinois, Arizona, California); while the details differ, the land use patterns are actually rather similar. Many state parks offer the same problems as Bear Mountain (in miniature; I chose Bear Mountain as a specific example because it seems to have one of everything!). Other state lands are, for the most part, more straightforward. Major categories that I've identified in New York:

State Forest Preserve: These are two sui generis features: the Adirondack and Catskill Parks. These are unapologetically tagged 'boundary=national_park' because that is the function that they serve. (They're not Federal because New York State got the idea first, and we protect them more strongly than the US government protects its national parks. They're actually enshrined in the State Constitution.) Were they to need a protect_class, it would be 'protect_class=2'. I've not spotted anything really similar in other states: the closest thing would have been the Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove, which belonged to the State of California prior to Theodore Roosevelt's endorsement of the bill that created Yosemite National Park in 1906.

State Park: In New York, these encompass a mix of things. They are tagged with protect_class=21, since they're all recreational resources. They're overtagged with the tag that appears best to describe the predominant land use: nature_reserve, recreation_ground, beach, golf_course, camping_site, and even park. (Parks in the UK English sense are vanishingly rare in the US: landscaping as a medium of public art never really caught on here.) They're all 'protect_class=21' - except for the handful of undeveloped parks that really are nature reserves (protect_class=3 or 5 for the most part)

State Multiple Use Area: These are 'protect_class=21' and are 'recreation_ground'. The difference between these and State Parks is political and rather complicated.

State Historic Site: Tagged according to function, usually 'museum'. They're all 'protect_class=22'

State Forest: These are overtagged as 'nature reserve', because 'nature reserve' can encompass a lot of things. They are all 'protect_class=6' since one of their purposes is sustainable timber harvesting.

State Wildlife Management Area: All are 'protect_class=4', except for the special case of the Rosendale bat caves, which is at least temporarily (since 2009) 'protect_class=1a'. They're overtagged 'nature_reserve'

State Wilderness, Wild Forest, Primitive Area, Canoe Area - All are 'protect_class=1b', and all are overtagged 'nature_reserve'. (The protection class is debatable for Wild Forest, but in practice these are a 'slightly lower grade' of wilderness, in which mountain biking, float-plane operations, and motorized access for persons with disabilities may be allowed. A very few have designated 'highway=track tracktype=grade4 or grade5' where ATV's or snowmobiles may be operated. The trails, together with primitive support facilities such as bridges, wells, privies, and lean-to's, are the only developed features in the WIld Forests.)

New York City Watershed Recreation Area: protect_class=12 protection_object=water. These are tagged 'nature reserve'. They are open to limited public recreation (many are permit-only, but the permits are free and easy to obtain) for passive activities such as hiking, bird watching, fishing, hunting, and non-motorized boating. They are undeveloped, although many bear signs of former habitation. 'protect_class=12' is unusual enough that I'm reasonably happy with the 'nature_reserve' overtagging, and don't ask for rendering.

There's a whole zoo of other designations, which I'm not going to list here

this is enough to give the flavor of the decisions.

-- 73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin

Since @kennykb has an active proposal for a new tag, protection_class=recreation, to replace protect_class=21 and because the old tag is not well defined, I will close this issue for now.

If protection_class=recreation gets approved and commonly used, or if that tag is rejected and instead protect_class=21 become more clearly defined and more common, we can reopen this discussion or open a new issue as appropriate.

gravitystorm / openstreetmap-carto

Add rendering for boundary=protected_area; class 21 #4109