Mapping the future?

Is there a best practice for mapping out rezoning and redevelopment plans?

Specific example: there is a military base in my city, which was closed 10 years ago. The city got about half of it and is building a park “twice the size of Central Park in New York City”. Kudos for them. The other half was sold to a developer, who will be building residential neighborhoods, commercial, smaller parks , etc.

Google has most of the base mapped in pretty green as the Great Park (which does not exist yet and will not for years): http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=33.669926,-117.731638&spn=0.051645,0.076475&z=14. OSM, up until recently when I got a hold of it, was showing a giant splat of TIGER-reported pink for landuse=military. So, really, neither map gives a realistic picture. In reality, the former base today is a patchwork of small public areas, nurseries , RV storage on runways and farming lands in between (“We had to generate income somehow” – City official), and vast fenced off areas.

I got a hold of the redevelopment map of the base from the city (with a specific permission to use it for OSM). I know OSM purports to show “what’s there”. So I went ahead and mapped out the RVs, the crops and the shuttered barracks that I was able to survey: http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=33.67573&lon=-117.73502&zoom=15&layers=M But shouldn’t we aim to reflect all available information? Is there a way to show “what will be”?

I tagged my park as construction=yes, but don’t see an effect on Mapnik. And if I change it to landuse=construction, the rendering will not reflect what is being constructed. Besides, very little construction is actually underway. It’s mostly just runways. :frowning: I considered mapping out the runways just to flesh the area out. But the runways will be broken up eventually.

There’s http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway=proposed, even if there has been at least two different views on when a drawn proposal of new roads really becomes worthy of that classification.

In my opinion it should be only used once the relevant authority (city/state) has approved the plans, and changing the future road layout - at least significantly - would require a new approval. Before that, there can be several ideas or proposals, most of which don’t have any significance. It can still take some years from the administative decision before they really start the construction work. Don’t know how freely the private developers are free to design and construct their projects in the US, though.

OSM knows:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:landuse%3Dbrownfield
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:landuse%3Dgreenfield

I have added some brownfields to the map of the base where I saw shuttered barracks and abandoned roads. I think I can spot plenty of greenfields both on the image and in survey.

I can see that both :former and :future suffixes are already in use, though probably undocumented use, as in name:former=, landuse:former=, amenity:former=, leisure:future= I am not saying the renderers respect these tags, but I like that people are trying to map “what’s known” in addition to “what’s there”. I can see tagging my ex-base and park-to-be as landuse:former=military and leisure:future=park. Chances are, the renderers and indexers will ignore these, and I will end up with a white spot, possibly with names rendered. But that’s fine - the mappers who will come after me 5 or 10 years down the road when the park (hopefully) is built, will know where I was going with it.

Does anyone think this is a terrible idea?

P.S. Taginfo suggests that currently name:future is used 88 times, landuse:future - 2, leisure:future - 1, name:former - 21, landuse:former - 3, amenity:former - 3, etc. Not overwhelming evidence in support, but at least someone has put a stake in the ground before me. Does landuse:future get rendered? Probably not. If I did it, I would have it render in the same color as the normal landuse with the same tag, but striped.

Noted. Any analog of ‘proposed’ tag for landuse, amenity and leisure keys? And yes, I am talking about a plan that has been approved by the city.