Greenery in sidlisko areas in Bratislava

This is a summary of the problem and a proposal regarding inconsistent treatment of greenery in sidlisko areas in Bratislava, Slovakia. Some arguments stem from my own experience with mapping these, some echo those I saw in various changeset comments. The following text is likely not exhaustive and I invite anyone concerned with the matter or area in question to join in discussion.

The subject

Greenery areas around blocks of flats on Bratislava’s sidlisko areas are specific. They’re typically grass, but often also with trees, benches, bins and play structures within them, all of it somewhat regularly maintained. I’ll call these areas panelak greenery for the remainder of this text.

The motivation

I began micromapping Karlova Ves and simply found that when adding detail up to splitting landuse on roads, using leisure=park becomes problematic. While leaving it mapped as huge blobs of leisure=park is an option, it’s a very rough approximation which doesn’t describe these areas in detail, which then defies the point of micromapping.

The problem

The subject as described above implies usage identical to that of a park, and indeed, leads one to consider that leisure=park is technically the right tag for such areas. It is also apparent that these areas are not parks in the traditional sense of being compact areas dedicated to leisure and intended for the wide public. Since this is a bit of an instinctive classification, I’ll try to break it down into particularities. What differentiates these areas from parks follows:

• Parks imply use by wide public. While panelak greenery areas aren’t normally gated and access to them is not restricted, it is rare that people from further away than a few houses visit these areas for leisure. This is unlike traditional parks. The extreme example would be Sad Janka Krala, which gets visited by people from all over the city, but even smaller parks see visitors from a wider radius. When panelak greenery is utilised for leisure, it’s usually by the closest panelaks’ inhabitants. Others usually just pass through, and the inhabitants, in fact, also mostly use these areas to get to their houses rather than for leisure. A good example is the neat areas between the single panelaks on Lackova. Locals also often decorate and improve these areas on their own, which may deter unrelated people to use these areas.
• Some of panelak greenery areas are too small to be considered a park in any sense. When micromapping, this creates a mess of parks and not-parks (grass, shrubbery) on the map, while in reality these areas do form compact wholes with the rest of the greenery. For example these triangles near Kuklovska.
• Some of panelak greenery is in close proximity with major roads and so even if it is park-like, it doesn’t provide any leisure and is not used in such a way. For example this area near Tilgnerova.

These are mostly problems which stem from tagging these areas as parks. Other problems may arise when tagging these areas as landuse=grass, which is the other closest match:

• Grass implies a simple grass surface. A park is expected to contain trees, shrubs and some amenities. Grass is not, so if one does not map trees separately within grass areas, they’re missing from the map rather than being present implicitly.
• If one does decide to map trees on these grass areas, a problem arises when there are multiple trees growing in disorganised fashion, making it impossible to place them as single nodes without an aerial map shot in winter, which still isn’t ideal, or GNSS with RTK correction, which is scarce among mappers. Tagging these as landuse=forest is not correct, since a forest retains a somewhat natural floor. Panelak greenery areas don’t, the trees are surrounded by mowed grass and anything that drops from the trees, be it branches or leaves, is also collected by the municipal services.
• The wiki, while it is descriptive and certainly not a holy grail, states grass use beyond that associated with roads is controversial. Though I’m not convinced of this, I’m including it because the wiki is an important resource.

The proposal.

My proposal is simple.

• Since tagging these areas as parks is problematic, I’d tag these areas primarily as landuse=grass, because that’s a primary characteristic common for pretty much all of them. Even when not micromapping, using leisure=park should be avoided to keep the distinction between actual parks and panelak greenery.
• An attempt to map trees should be made, as these are a major visual and functional element and it’s desirable to know of their (lack of) presence for both orientation and planning, when using the map. Individual trees and tree rows should be used. I’d personally speak for using natural=tree_group for groups of trees, even though the tag only has about 8000 uses. It is, however, documented on the wiki and usage is rising. This tag perfectly solves the problem with individual trees being too difficult to place.
• Smaller details like shrubbery, flowerbeds, benches and bins can be left to the micromappers. While implied in parks, they’re likewise often present on roadside greenery, so little information is lost when not including them by implication.

I’d like to hear your opinion on this, but I’m also prepared to simply harmonise landuse in Karlova Ves in this fashion if no protest is made in a longer period of time.