Missing nested cities within Aberdeen, Scotland

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Hi, I noticed that Aberdeen, Scotland contains 9 nested cities in City Strides but they are all clustered on the east side of Aberdeen. There are more* suburbs within Aberdeen and I wondered if it’s possible to add them as nested cities in City Strides? I’m happy to do more research to assist but getting this far has been a bit of a struggle :slight_smile: Adding in more suburbs would be really helpful in terms of breaking up the larger city into more easily-achievable chunks!

Cheers
Ceri

Reference links

(apologies, as a new user I can only include 2 links so I’ve just put reference numbers for the others):
Aberdeen Scotland:
[CS city 130471, OSM relation 10005204]

Nested City example which is already included in City Strides: Tillydrone

[OSM relation 10005204]

This borders 5 suburbs, of which 3 are in City Strides and 2 are not:
Woodside and Hilton (not in CS): [OSM 11524363]
Danestone (not in CS) [OSM 11167705]
Bridge of Don (included in CS) [OSM 8555185]
Old Aberdeen (included in CS) [OSM 8635383]
Froghall, Powis and Sunnybank (included in CS) [OSM 10005081]

*I had a look at OSM but haven’t (yet) found a way of making a list of neighbourhoods/suburbs within a boundary for checking. Instead I’ve found out one or two “missing” suburb names by zooming in on OSM and looking for labels each side of a suburb boundary, then searching on those names. No doubt there’s a smarter way of doing this!

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Replying to my own query…
I’ve spent a bit more time searching the forum and it looks like I should add the nested cities which I think are missing to Missing/Broken Cities Tracker with a note to say they are nested under Aberdeen. I plan to try to do this in due course.

  • It would still be really helpful to know if there is a way of finding out the suburbs within a city automatically. I’ve gone through manually (scanning boundaries by hand, region by region) and found 24 regions inside Aberdeen City.

  • Also there appear to be a small number (maybe 4) of suburbs that are not defined as regions (?just nodes). It would be helpful to know if there is a way to confirm this in OSM before I embark on finding out how to go about deciding where the boundaries should sit, what they should be called, and adding them to OSM.

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If you click the Run button in the top left of overpass turbo it’ll display all the admin level 10 places that could be nested in Aberdeen. It may prompt you to click the magnifying glass icon after the results are loaded.

If you open the nested city list in Aberdeen, Scotland - CityStrides (the tab with the globe icon) and click Show for each of them, you can see that not everything was imported - just the eastern coast places.

I should be able to just import everything at admin level 10 & nest all of those.

There is that gap in the center - there doesn’t appear to be any relation/way record for that area. So, I won’t be able to have coverage there.

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Thanks James, that’s really helpful and the overpass turbo script answers my question perfectly.

I did some research and I think the missing areas in the middle of Aberdeen are Community Council areas within Aberdeen City with defined names and boundaries shown on the council website, so I will aspire to educate myself to be able to add these to OSM in due course!

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I had a look at the OSM edit guidelines but adding new council areas to a city which already has good data coverage from a lot of active editors looked too daunting for me to attempt.
Instead, I’ve collected references for the 15 existing nested cities (Aberdeen community council areas) that aren’t currently in CityStrides plus the 6 community council areas missing from OSM and added them to the Missing/Broken Cities Tracker.
I put them all at the start of the United Kingdom - Scotland rows since they all ultimately refer to Aberdeen which is first alphabetically. Hopefully that’s enough research and now it’s just a case of coding up the missing council areas in OSM and linking them through to CityStrides if and when someone has time (or I figure out how to do it myself!).

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More generally, I noted (I’m currently travelling in that part of the world) that a lot of Scottish places, including some pretty large ones, are missing (as is Belfast in Northern Ireland), presumably a result of how Scottish urban boundaries are defined in OSM? (I haven’t looked directly at OSM).

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Some of the effort required around the entries for Aberdeen that were added to the Missing/Broken Cities Tracker - Google Sheets is more than can be gracefully handled in a spreadsheet - it feels more conversational to me. There’s a bunch of useful info in that sheet that I don’t want to get lost, so I’m including those links here:

I’ve removed all of the entries for nested cities in Aberdeen & replaced them all with a single row for “Aberdeen nested cities”. It looks like I can get most of that done by importing all admin level 10 places as nested in Aberdeen. You can click the “Run” button in the top left of this page then the magnifying glass icon on the map after the query finishes: overpass turbo

There’s a bit of a gap in the center - perhaps the links above can help people map that area out. Using this thread to discuss that work is much better than attempting to do so in a spreadsheet.

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Thanks James - apologies for time required to tidy up my ungraceful spreadsheet additions!