A quarter is an area of a city smaller than place=suburb, but larger than place=neighbourhood. A quarter may have an administrative boundary, or only a node marking its nominal centre.
The proposal for this tag was approved in 2012-01.
It would be nice if this tag could be rendered.
It is used only 585 times - see http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/place=quarter
Rejected per https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/1247#issuecomment-72851791.
Was place=quarter rejected for the same reasons as place=borough, i.e. that the concept represents an administrative boundary and not a kind of geographic place? Does this constitute a veto over the wiki’s acceptance of place=quarter? Is it now advisable to use place=suburb and place=neighbourhood, and avoid using place=quarter?
Not arguing, just trying to understand what rejection means for this tag, and how OpenStreetMap editors should proceed.
By the way, place=quarter is now used 1,048 times. Its occurrence has increased 80% in six months.
I support place=quarter for subdivision entities between "suburb" and
"neighbourhood" in bigger places and for entities in smaller places above
"neighbourhood" (used for mapping subdivisions of places)
Was place=quarter rejected for the same reasons as place=borough
They have both been rejected since I don't want to see more place values rendered at this time.
Personally, I believe there is more value in using a fixed list of values, rather than adding more granularity to an already impossible-to-tell-apart list.
Consider this: should we add 5 more tracktypes? Or how about 2 more smoothness values? Why are there a mere 19 values of the highway tag, when there are surely more than 40 different types of road in the whole world?
Does this constitute a veto over the wiki’s acceptance of place=quarter?
We can choose in this project what we want to render, and are certainly not forced to render all tags documented on the wiki. So the acceptance of a tag on the wiki is not a requirement to render.
Secondly, it's false to think that by choosing not to render something we have any kind of "veto". That presupposes that we are somehow involved in a voting system for tags, which is definitely not true.
Is it now advisable to use place=suburb and place=neighbourhood, and avoid using place=quarter?
I would always advise using existing tags, especially in continuous-scale situations where nobody benefits from more values. But whether we render it or not I'd still give the same advice, so nothing has changed there.
2015-02-06 15:35 GMT+01:00 Andy Allan [email protected]:
Personally, I believe there is more value in using a fixed list of values,
rather than adding more granularity to an already impossible-to-tell-apart
list.
I don't share you're impression that place values for settlements and parts
of them are "already impossible to tell apart", IMHO they are rather clear
and well distinguishable:
city, town, village, hamlet, isolated_dwelling. that's all for settlements
suburb, neighbourhood. that's all for parts of settlements
These are neither many nor is there overlap, typically.
Place=quarter _is_ an existing tag, Gravitystorm, for two years now. You seem to be advising OSM mappers to ignore it, because they made a mistake in adopting it, and tag for the renderer instead. Of course you’re entitled, but it doesn’t seem like a productive way to build the renderer for OSM.
2015-02-06 15:35 GMT+01:00 Andy Allan [email protected]:
Secondly, it's false to think that by choosing not to render something we
have any kind of "veto". That presupposes that we are somehow involved in a
voting system for tags, which is definitely not true.
osm-carto is the main map. It is _very_ important what it does display and
it is _highly_ influencing people's choice which tags to use. If you use a
highway tag that is not displayed on osm-carto, the road will be missing
and hence this is not an option.
The same goes for settlements and parts of them, if you want to have
something as important as a settlement or a part of it displayed on the
map, you'll have no other option than choose a tag that is rendered (and if
you don't do it, someone else will do it).
@gravitystorm: I second what @dieterdreist said - osm-carto is the main map and you are the leading person here, so it is "kind of veto" (not the direct one, but still) you have in your hands.
As a Japanese OSM mapper, I also hope to add rendering place=quarter.
There are many places smaller than suburb, but bigger than neighborhood in Japan.
place=hamlet would be able to use instead of quarter, but especially in city/town area, these places are very near(not isolated), so I think using place=hamlet tag is not suitable.
Additionally, in OSM Talk-ja, we have discussed how to importing place name data that released by government for a while.(OSM wiki: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/JA:MLIT_ISJ ;sorry, only Japanese page...) so I believe that place=quarter rendering would be encouraged to increase to add place name data near aroud Japan.
Please reopen this issue, quarter fills in the gap between suburb and neigbourhood in the Netherlands. At the moment there is no other tag to label city districts (wijken) in the Netherlands, people are now misusing place=suburb or landuse=residential for this simply because quarter isn't rendered. Place=neigbourhood (buurten) is for smaller subsections of quarters (wijken).
2017-04-28 9:31 GMT+02:00 ligfietser notifications@github.com:
Please reopen this issue, quarter fills in the gap between suburb and
neigbourhood in the Netherlands. At the moment there is no other tag to
label city districts (wijken) in the Netherlands, people are now misusing
place=suburb or landuse=residential for this simply because quarter isn't
rendered. Place=neigbourhood (buurten) is for smaller subsections of
quarters (wijken).
I also believe that we should have more than just 2 kind of place
subdivisions within settlements. It is not needed everywhere but there are
surely places (e.g. also in Rome there is this need to adequately represent
the toponym hierarchy, although our mapping has not yet arrived at
comprehensively represent them everywhere).
I drafted a hierarchy of urban place subdivisions. Suburb would only be used in cities. Towns would use the smaller place=quarter: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Jojo4u/place_hierarchy
This draft was presented in german forum but did not gain any response :/
Tag usage of quarter has increased significantly and there is evidence of tagging for the renderer. I'm reopening this so that the renewed discussion does not need to happen on a closed issue. This does not mean that this is ready to be rendered. Work that has to be done is to see if the scheme is consistent and how it would fit into the already rendered values.
Personally I think that we need to avoid rendering values that cover small areas and do not have much significance like city_block and maybe also neighborhood.
The text for neighbourhood names is too small. It's smaller than features inside the neighbourhood like parks, and it disappears if you zoom out to look at two neighbourhoods at once. I see three possible solutions:
I would probably take 2.
The usage is high enough for me (4 712) and growing constantly:

I'm mapping a municipality consisting of a 23K town and 2 villages. Based on the wiki, I would use the following scheme:
But since quarter is not rendered, I used suburb for the town's subdivisions and neighborhood for village's. The village is perfect but the town is too eyesore with about 15 suburb labels popping out at z14, and sometimes the style picks the smaller suburbs over the bigger ones to render, even though all the nodes have population tag and are part of a type=boundary with role=label.
I propose the following options:
population tag on urban subdivisions is not widespread enough.type=boundary. Not only would it be too overkill but also it might be misleading as the biggest suburbs are sometimes the least populated (houses are quite spread, low density etc).But if I _had_ to stick to official data from the local townhall, I'd pick option 1 since we don't have an official suburb hierarchy -- there's no such a thing as a 'quarter' or 'neighborhood': no matter the place has half a block or 30 blocks they all are called suburbs -- and the inhabitants tend to use the "major suburbs" as their reference for their "minor suburbs".
Are you willing to prepare the code?
Are you willing to prepare the code?
I'm sorry if I caused any problem, sounded demanding or tried to rush developers. Please don't get me wrong, but your reply seems I'm required to code to be able to comment (my 1st comment on this git btw). I saw you commented _"The usage is high enough for me (4 712) and growing constantly"_ and the discussion was reopened one year ago (as said here), then I thought it would be worthy commenting. :)
Oh, that might really sound as a demand, sorry for that! I just want to ask if you're interested in coding it. because we have not enough active programmers and just asking helped some people to try it. I feel this is one of a big missing blocks (next to place=square, which was eventually added lately), so I would be happy if you will give it a shot.
Most helpful comment
I would probably take 2.
The usage is high enough for me (4 712) and growing constantly:
