As mentioned in earlier chapters, human settlements are important base points for the alpine style hiker (food supply, night shelter, recharge electronics, guidance). In this chapter we will see how to map human settlements (OSM tag "place") in Open Street Maps through the web client osm.org.

First of all let's familiarize ourselves with the "place" hierarchy in OSM:

city - largest urban settlement within the territory.
town - important urban center, between a village and a city in size
village - smaller distinct settlement, smaller than a town with few facilities available with people traveling to nearby towns to access these
hamlet - smaller rural community, typically with fewer than 50-100 inhabitants, and little infrastructure
isolated_dwelling - smallest kind of settlement usually located remotely (few households)

Below we can see an overview of OSM places around Chamba in Himachal using QGIS. We usually find villages (red) in main valleys connected by roads, farming hamlets (yellow) higher up the valley slopes and isolated_dwellings (green) deeper inside the mountains / forest. See Image 1 below.

Similarly in osm.org we can see towns appear at zoom level 9, villages (zoom 12), hamlets (zoom 14) and dwellings (zoom 16). See Image 2 below.

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/32.5628/76.1603&layers=Y