I’ve been scratching my head as to why the very significant Peterborough Guildhall doesn’t show up in Mapnik as a building, only as a disembodied name: photo | permalink to OSM object | iD wireframe on Mapnik render so you can see what I’m looking at.
It’s actually a styling decision by the developers of that map style. You’ll need to “cut a hole” in the pedestrian area for it to appear. In a sense that’s correct - the pedestrian area doesn’t “extend underneath” the guildhall I guess.
Thanks, that’s very helpful - I did that, and then today there was one further edit from mboeringa.
From which I can infer, for anyone finding this thread:
Once you’ve merged the closed ways into a multipolygon, you will need to remove tags from the larger area (ie, the closed way that is now the outer boundary of the multipolygon).
After some thinking: making holes is perfectly sane way. Squares are not necessary the same as pedestrian areas, they can contain buildings, green patches, fountains etc. You should tag square with a place=square (with no holes, of course) to indicate that both pedestrian area and building belong to the same square.
I would do it the opposite way. The relation should be the pedestrian area, because that’s the one that needs the holes cut out of it. Then, the outer way can be the place=square, which would cover everything inside that way (including the holes, because the way doesn’t have anything cut out of it).