Stale Developments

This tool collects UK OSM objects corresponding to construction work or land allocated to developments that were last edited over 12 months ago. Such sites probably warrant a check to see if the tagging is still appropriate (e.g. has the construction work been completed). The locations of these objects can be accessed through the Survey Me! tool, and particularly old examples are also listed below.

The following Overpass query is used to find objects:

nwr["landuse"="construction"]; nwr["highway"="construction"]; nwr["landuse"="greenfield"]; nwr["landuse"="brownfield"];

In the OSM data from 2023‑05‑28 18:17:54 Z, there are 13507 UK objects matching this query that have not been edited in the last 12 months.

Editing suggestions: examine each object and see if you can determine whether the existing tagging is still accurate. This may be through a groupd survey or by looking at aerial imagery (be careful how recent the imagery is). If things have changed, fix the tagging and/or create new OSM objects. If the existing tags are still correct, you can leave things as they are, but it might be useful to add a note to other mappers saying that things look to still be in this state. The fact that the object has recently been edited, will then remove if from the lists in this tool, the next time the data is refreshed.

Note that the tagging landuse=greenfield and landuse=brownfield should be used denote land scheduled for development that has previously been undeveloped (greenfield) or developed (brownfield). These tag values appear to have been mis-understood in the past. A significant proportion of older instances appear to have been used incorrectly to denote grassed areas, parks or farmland. Please correct any instances of this that you find with more appropriate tagging.

Of the 13507 objects found, 2990 have not been edited for over 48 months. These are listed in the table below. Alternatively, this customisable OverPass Turbo Query can be used to find the construction (and related) objects in a given region that haven't been edited since a given date.