City, Cityscape, Urban tags are a mess

So it looks (to me at least) like the city, cityscape and urban tags are being used pretty much interchangeably and are a bit of a mess. I'd volunteer to clean these up but I'm not even sure how we mean to distinguish between them. At a minimum I'm going to do some tag gardening in cityscape (post #7697654, post #7651676, etc) for anything that isn't the urban equivalent of a landscape focus.

None of the tags currently implicate/are implicated by anything. That's probably fine but they definitely overlap as currently used.

The last time I saw this discussed it went nowhere and the only response was that "city = when a city forms the setting of the image." Urban exists but on a lot of those posts it doesn't add anything useful or searchable.

The wiki pages aren't helping any:

Just looking for feedback here before I make anything worse. Anything to do here or just leave it alone?

NorthernWing said:

The wiki pages aren't helping any:

I'm not surprised, seeing as they don't tell people how the tags should be used.

Here's my suggestion:

Cityscape should be the tag that is used when the focus of the artwork is the city itself, i.e. the structures, rather than people. (It is supposed to be the urban equivalent of a landscape painting.) If there are people within the image, then they are either out-of-focus, or they're smaller in scale compared to the buildings around them. For example: post #7663943, post #7405853, post #6450305, post #6409156.

Urban should be the tag that is used when the city is a setting, rather than the subject for the image. In other words, the focus are on the people, and the city is just a backdrop for the subjects. I would probably define it along the lines of aesthetic and setting. For example: post #7658079, post #7649165, post #7625324, post #7603550, post #6002803.

Thus, post #6252717 would actually be tagged correctly, and posts like post #7651676 would belong under Urban.

I think it might be best if we depreciate "City" since it's describing a place, rather than an artistic focus to an image. Perhaps we'd have to manually clean up "City" before doing any changes, though.

Largely agreed with winterless above.

Though, I believe rather than depreciating City, it should be aliased to something like Metropolis (and metropolis qualified to something like metropolis_(manga)?). Posts like post #4334960, post #4261789 and post #7343287 where the subject is outside of a city, not the city itself, and the city is a background element are valid use-cases for a city/metropolis tag.

I'm also of the opinion that cityscape encapsulates any depiction of a large scale settlement, so something like post #6151139 is of equal validity to modern or sci-fi urban environments. Meanwhile, urban is largely contemporaneous.

Yeah I think I agree with that. I assume city was intended to be the next logical progression in village -> town -> city where the city is the subject of the image as a distant view/background element, and aliasing to something like 'Metropolis' would help with the confusion.

Cityscape for posts like post #7495170 and post #7248568 with the city as a landscape focus, and Urban for things like post #7104836 in an obvious city setting or background but not the focus of the image.

I'll watch for some more feedback here before I go proposing any BURs/etc.

Yeah, the City tag is going to be a few hundred pages of mess but I'd volunteer to help with some manual cleanup beforehand if we want to push any of this through.

I think that we should start working through these tags, now.

Also, should the wiki be updated with my definitions on what the tags should mean?

winterless said:

I'm not surprised, seeing as they don't tell people how the tags should be used.

Here's my suggestion:

Cityscape should be the tag that is used when the focus of the artwork is the city itself, i.e. the structures, rather than people. (It is supposed to be the urban equivalent of a landscape painting.) If there are people within the image, then they are either out-of-focus, or they're smaller in scale compared to the buildings around them. For example: post #7663943, post #7405853, post #6450305, post #6409156.

Urban should be the tag that is used when the city is a setting, rather than the subject for the image. In other words, the focus are on the people, and the city is just a backdrop for the subjects. I would probably define it along the lines of aesthetic and setting. For example: post #7658079, post #7649165, post #7625324, post #7603550, post #6002803.

Thus, post #6252717 would actually be tagged correctly, and posts like post #7651676 would belong under Urban.

I think it might be best if we depreciate "City" since it's describing a place, rather than an artistic focus to an image. Perhaps we'd have to manually clean up "City" before doing any changes, though.

I agree with this as well, but I would go with Ai-to-Yukai's way for how to tag city.

winterless said:

I think that we should start working through these tags, now.

Also, should the wiki be updated with my definitions on what the tags should mean?

It's been a year with no one updating it so I would go for it, that way we can start gardening thoses tags.

i've always felt like cityscape was supposed to mean there is a city in the horizon but it seems i was wrong

i'm not sure if it makes sense to deprecate city because there is also village and it just feels like the natural progression of where the characters are depicted

btw city vs. urban is easy because we also have medieval / fantasy cities in the tag

whatever is decided pls include some examples vs. non-examples images in the wiki

i've taken a look at some images and this is how i feel about them

urban... because of the night lights? graffiti also feels urban to me but that probably isn't what the tag is for

in a city

a city in the bg

a cityscape in the horizon

i genuinely wouldn't call an aerial shot of a city a "cityscape" but ymmv

btw i noticed that aerial view has been aliased to from above so i guess that's one thing that has been decided already in the past

trapster77 said:
i've taken a look at some images and this is how i feel about them

In order, I’d tag these urban, urban, city, city + skyline, city.

I tried to clarify the wiki on urban to get the ball rolling. Feel free to tweak or redefine it as necessary.

Cityscape has a huge overlap with skyline. I almost feel like they should be merged, but I would include aerial shots without a contour against a horizon as a cityscape.

City is one of those tricky tags that can have multiple distinct applications:

• A city existing as a distinct object in a very wide shot (post #6289267)
• Something between urban and cityscape, perhaps even be implicated by cityscape, or outright merged.

luntoer said:
Cityscape has a huge overlap with skyline. I almost feel like they should be merged, but I would include aerial shots without a contour against a horizon as a cityscape.

I think merging cityscape and skyline would be a bad idea. post #9976407, post #9976232, post #9909439, and post #9909473 are cityscape but not skyline. They’re also visually distinct from something like post #9976832 or post #9976922 which are tagged skyline.

Placeholder1996 said:

In order, I’d tag these urban, urban, city, city + skyline, city.

i didn't know about skyline.

hmmm... is the only thing separating city from cityscape the aerial shots that need to be tagged from above?

NorthernWing said:

Cityscape for posts like post #7495170 and post #7248568 with the city as a landscape focus

that sounds like an argument for a lanscape focus or scenery focus tag to be honest

I propose a simple scale system to define and clean up these tags:

• Urban - A street-level view of a (modern?) city with an emphasis on the developed, artificial aspects of a city. This should give a sense of what an individual would see if they lived or existed in such a place.
• Cityscape - A level above urban, but which may overlap with it. A landscape that takes place at a city, whether on ground or from the air, showing many blocks of builldings and can include a skyline. The overlap with urban can occur if it's at a street-level view but still gives a wider view of the city (e.g. post #9288708, post #9976407)
• City - Anything beyond cityscape, a larger view where the details of individual streets and buildings start becoming indistinct. This includes scenery where a city is distinct object among the background. (e.g. post #9307269, post #10034347, post #6289267)

luntoer said:

I propose a simple scale system to define and clean up these tags:

• Urban - A street-level view of a (modern?) city with an emphasis on the developed, artificial aspects of a city. This should give a sense of what an individual would see if they lived or existed in such a place.
• Cityscape - A level above urban, but which may overlap with it. A landscape that takes place at a city, whether on ground or from the air, showing many blocks of builldings and can include a skyline. The overlap with urban can occur if it's at a street-level view but still gives a wider view of the city (e.g. post #9288708, post #9976407)
• City - Anything beyond cityscape, a larger view where the details of individual streets and buildings start becoming indistinct. This includes scenery where a city is distinct object among the background. (e.g. post #9307269, post #10034347, post #6289267)

hmm... i feel like city sounds too generic to be restricted to just "if you see a whole city use this tag" specially when the same logic doesn't apply to village, forest, desert, ocean or anything else

imo city should just be a parent tag for all city tags like urban, cityscape and city lights

i like the idea of making urban "street-level" but i feel we need more simple ways to say when the tag applies or not. like i said bright city lights at night and graffiti feel urban to me. maybe we can just make a list of things that feel urban and put it into the wiki?

i think cityscape should be like... if you can see multiple whole buildings/houses. basically

cityscape

not cityscape, just in a city

i guess the problem is that there is "a city in the background" but sometimes that's not a whole city, it's just a couple of buildings and other times it's like barely even that and we want some tag for this...

this has some buildings in the background

this has a city in the background

you can't even see the whole buildings here

if the cityscape tag is supposed to apply every time there is some buildings in the background, i guess that's fine too, but it makes urban even harder to distinguish

luntoer said:
I propose a simple scale system to define and clean up these tags:
[...]

Late response, but this seems like a logical system to me.

luntoer said:

I propose a simple scale system to define and clean up these tags:

• Urban - A street-level view of a (modern?) city with an emphasis on the developed, artificial aspects of a city. This should give a sense of what an individual would see if they lived or existed in such a place.
• Cityscape - A level above urban, but which may overlap with it. A landscape that takes place at a city, whether on ground or from the air, showing many blocks of builldings and can include a skyline. The overlap with urban can occur if it's at a street-level view but still gives a wider view of the city (e.g. post #9288708, post #9976407)
• City - Anything beyond cityscape, a larger view where the details of individual streets and buildings start becoming indistinct. This includes scenery where a city is distinct object among the background. (e.g. post #9307269, post #10034347, post #6289267)

I second this framework. Thoughts for:

• Urban to denote the street-level scenery makes sense. Four buildings is not a visualization of "city", which the standard of tagging, visualization. And Urban for street-level scenes seems quite straightforward. Essentially, city-as-foreground. Urban should not be defined as the phenotypical modern city. Instead, individual visual elements should thus be tagged.
• Cityscape, within that framework, becomes city-as-background, which of course can coexist with urban scenery.
• And a city should be a visualization of the thing-in-itself, the city. A somewhat subjective standard, but generally visualizes the "map" of a city.

Some examples:

Urban

Urban, weak cityscape

Cityscape, very weak urban.

City. Beyond a cityscape, and not "urban" scenery.

Urban and cityscape.

It will take some work to reorganize these tags. urban or city or cityscape has around 46 thousand posts.