Fusion of Flemish towns

Hi all,

Happy new years!

With the new year, multiple Flemish towns have merged together, forming new towns. Besides that, many names of streets will be changed in the affected towns. I dont know whether these changes would be solved automatically in citystrides. I am fairly certain the street name updates would, but i dont know if the new city borders and names require a manual fix?

Here are some examples of fusions that i am aware of (i beleive there were about 15):

Beveren+Kruibeke+Zwijndrecht-> “Beveren-Kruibeke-Zwijndrecht”

Melle+Merelbeke-> “Merelbeke-Melle”

Lokeren+Moerbeke-> “Lokeren”

I will add the links to the cities if necessary later.

Thanks!

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Having links will be very helpful. At the least, though, I’ll need a complete list in the style of what you’ve already created for those three examples.

My workflow will be to edit one of the existing pre-merge cities e.g. Beveren and remove the others e.g. Kruibeke and Zwijndrecht.
Many times the changes in OpenStreetMap dictate those choices - the editor might opt to edit one of the few and then remove the others … This is not the case in this example (the merged city a totally new record).

In CityStrides there’s:

The updated location in OpenStreetMap is:

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This happened in Portugal during the austerity years specifically in 2013, a fusion of municipal units to centralize administration and reduce costs, and it proved extremely unpopular as there are now 124 unionized municipalities that will be disaggregated during 2025 (66 more applied to be disaggregated and were rejected for various reasons).

On the CityStrides side I’m curious what will happen with your fusion, as will probably need a reverse process when any of the 124 with active striding are legally disaggregated. At least a few of them I’ve definitely run in :slight_smile:

All right! Here is a list of all fused towns:

Antwerpen+Borsbeek → ‘Antwerpen’

Beveren+Kruibeke+Zwijndrecht → ‘Beveren-Kruibeke-Zwijndrecht’

Bilzen+Hoeselt → ‘Bilzen-Hoeselt’

Borgloon+Tongeren → ‘Tongeren-Borgloon’

De Pinte+Nazareth → ‘Nazareth-De Pinte’

Galmaarden+Gooik+Herne → ‘Pajottegem’

Ham+Tessenderlo → ‘Tessenderlo-Ham’

Hasselt+Kortessem → ‘Hasselt’

Lochristi+Wachtebeke → ‘Lochristi’

Lokeren+Moerbeke → ‘Lokeren’

Merelbeke+Melle → ‘Merelbeke-Melle’

Meulebeke+Tielt → ‘Tielt’

Ruiselede+Wingene → ‘Wingene’

Apparently one new town also exists now in the french speaking part of Belgium:

Bastogne+Bertogne → ‘Bastogne’

OK, I just went through and corrected these towns. It’s going to take some time to sync and process the underlying data - probably on the scale of hours.

Thanks for the work! All cities seem to be updated. There are some issues though. For Beveren-Kruibeke-Zwijndrecht the borders are changed but only the streets from Beveren are included. I have to check for other towns but the others I ran in did go through correctly.

I can confirm the same issue with Nazareth-De Pinte: only the streets of former De Pinte are associated with this city now.

By the looks of it, “De Pinte” (city #29340) was renamed to “Nazareth-De Pinte” and “Nazareth” (city #29338) was removed from the database (the latter link gives a 404 now). I expect that some extra work is needed by @JamesChevalier to link the streets of city #29338 to that of #29340 in the DB.