My profile link : Tobias Göth - CityStrides
How does CS define a city? How about towns and villages? I live on Gotland, an island in the baltic sea. Visby where I reside, is the main town with about 25k. inhabitants, but CS treats the whole island as one city. The island itself is nationally defined as a kommun(council/municipalities) and then bigger entities län (region).
Unfortunately, it’s all figured out by one dumb American who semi-regularly gets it wrong. 
I get the boundaries from OpenStreetMap. It’s usually based on admin level, where countries are at level 2, most times the regions are at level 4 … many times cities are at level 8, but that’s not consistent at all.
Sometimes there’s a lack of data at certain levels that forces my hand one way or another e.g. forcing me to use a larger level than what’s typically seen as a city, because nothing is mapped lower.
Gotland is “in” Sweden, so I went with Relation: Gotland County (941530) | OpenStreetMap as the region since it follows the general precedence of regions being admin level 4.
With that, I usually go over to Overpass to run some queries to find which admin level is “best” for cities. This query (you’ll have to click the Run button) should just display the region on its own. I’ll run a few queries, swapping out the “4” for other typical values (6,7,8,9,10). You can also remove the =‘4’ text altogether to have it display all available places with an admin_level value (this isn’t generally ‘safe’ to do for larger areas, because it will return too much data).
Another approach is to click the date on city page (under the city name), which will take you to the OpenStreetMap page for the city. You can then zoom very far into areas like Visby, right click the map, and choose “Query features”. This will populate an “Enclosing features” section in the left column which will list all of the areas that cover that point.
For Gotland, I don’t see anything usably mapped smaller than the island itself. So, this looks like one of the situations where my hand is forced to choose - exclude Gotland entirely, or bring the island in as a city.
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I think I can make a more Sweden specific reply😊. Sweden is divided into 290 kommuner, or municipalities. (And that covers all of Sweden, every part of Sweden belongs to one of these kommuner). They are imported to CS as cities. Then we have 21 län (regions) above that. Now Tobias brings up a very special case. The island of Gotland is a län, Gotlands län, with only one city/kommun, Visby. So the region and the city are actually the same area, but with different names, and separate governments (as regional and kommun governments have very separate areas of governing, e.g. region handles health care, kommun handles schools, etc)
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Thanks guys! My then my following question is this. Is there any way to define Visby as a city area/ town for CS? Cheers.
Not easily… All kommuner in Sweden are defined in OSM as admin_level 7. If there are well defined sub-areas to a kommun they can be entered in OSM. E.g. Stockholm is officially divided into 11 “stadsdelsområden”, and they exist in OSM with admin_level 9, and they are imported into CS. But it seems there is nothing like that for Gotland?
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