Tag:construction=building

History

Usage on construction=building is currently a valley: It used to hit a spike mid-2012 before slowly declining in use up until 2016 where usage was slowly rising again before gaining a lot of traction since 2023, albeit nowhere near to the level of 2012.

Use on buildings

construction=building is commonly used together on construction=building. The issue with this definition is the recursion because this implied building=building as the final product. Potential cause of it is to suppress warnings on editors like JOSM which complains if a building=construction is missing out a construction=*.

Alternatives to consider:

• Survey the location and see which building will be constructed in the first place (it's enough to use a general value like construction=residential).
• Estimate the usage from the areal imagery (if you aren't entirely sure, add a fixme=*)
• Retag it to construction:building=yes (data consumers and quality assurance are still able to figure out a building under construction since it's long established as a synonym to building=construction)
• Some mappers use construction=yes (note that while the use of this tag is deprecated to mark objects under construction, here it's used to imply building=yes once the construction is finished)
• Leave the error as it is and don't mess up the data.

Use on construction sites.

It's also sometimes used on landuse=construction. Similar to the above, it may be used to suppress warnings on editors like JOSM but it can also be used to denote the product of a construction site, especially when used as an outline of a constructing building. This, however, can be seen as a type of mistagging for the renderer because buildings under construction in either tagging are rendered (on Carto) like most other buildings but distinct in case of landuse=construction but has a problem for data consumers because the construction site is usually larger than the building itself (even for a single building, it often includes the whole plot).

Another problem is that doing so you're losing out any building information you can enter i.e. it is not possible to specify if the final building is a e.g. house or school, especially since certain values like building=industrial are identical to landuse=industrial and may be confused with each other. A way to bypass this (albeit non-standard to the current tagging style) is to add building=* to the constructing building (note that both landuse=* and building=* are top-level tags and elements should ideally have only one or the other) or add construction:building=* which better represents the reality (and even then, you can remove the landuse=construction and construction=building from the element altogether instead, especially if the construction site is already added in OSM).

Alternatives to consider (preferably mixed together):

• Tag the whole are as landuse=construction with construction=* of the best fitting landuse value (e.g. residential)
• Tag the building as building=construction or construction:building=* instead.