Talk:Tag:building=civic

Do you know what is the difference between building=civic and building=public?

Chrabros (talk) 07:28, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

IMO civic can be state/municipality run offices etc. that would not have any amenity=* associated with them; things like ministry of finance, where one would not just walk in; in a building=public I would expect to find a public lobby where I can just walk in and initiate something. However, sometimes these (building=civic) are possibly better as building=office. This distinction comes from us having used landuse=civic for plots reserved for such public instances that aren't really commercial (they don't aim to sell anything), nor industrial (they don't manufacture anything). Alv (talk) 14:19, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

Also, these both are more about the use of the building and not about the form of the building, so IMO it's better to use a value that describes the construction vs. usage; what does "a public building" look like? Alv (talk) 14:24, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for your opinion. I was just trying to document the tags already in use. Maybe you are right that both of them should be labeled in a different way as "office".

What does "a public building" look like? It is ugly and VERY expensive. Oh, no, that's civic building. ;-) Chrabros (talk) 04:38, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

I think that a tag landuse=civic would be very useful!

For me none, at least none that would be consistent Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 15:53, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

Suggest not to use this tag

I dispute the sense of this tag, better use something more specific. Why should the townhall get the same building type as a swimming pool? "Public building" is a very rough category that someone can use to distinguish public functions on a final map product, but this does not need to get reflected on database level. We can have much more specific tags describing the building type (the way the building is structured) and the functions inside the building, so anyone creating a map can decide which categories to make up and how to show them to the map users (e.g. he can make the category "public building" or "civic" and put there all the buildings he decides to put). If we do not enter more details into the map (e.g. because we use too generic types) we will limit the possible use cases and reduce the information in the database. --Dieterdreist (talk) 19:18, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

I somehow agree with Dieterdreist, the building=* tag should reflect construction, and not function. I.e. on my town several civic and public functions are in ordinary residential buildings. I would tag that with building=residential since that is how the building visually appear, and other tags such as office=administrative, amenity=community_center, or what fits best to the function they offer. As I understand, the purpose of a more specific tagging scheme than the simple building=yes is to be able to offer a "default" shape when 3d visualising the map. The actual civic function comes with other tags. --Skippern (talk) 12:59, 31 January 2015 (UTC)