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I would like to extract all the cities along with their administrative hierarchy within a country.
I was thinking to use a mix of tag and geom information since tags are often inconsistent/incomplete:
Maybe start searching with the boundary=administrative tag which should exist for major subdivision, then list the node[place=city] within the area.
That would take quite a while though, especially when getting to smaller admin divisions.
Is there a straight way to do this?
The Mapzen Borders project would have provided exactly the data your looking for, but Mapzen is dead, and the download links on that page all 404 now.
What the Mapzen Borders data was:
Each country link contains a zipped directory of geojson files, each describing increasingly detailed administrative boundaries. The hierarchy varies by country but in the United States, admin layer 2 describes the national boundary, layer 4 is states, layer 6 is counties, and layer 8 is cities. The OSM wiki has specifics for each country.
The code used to produce those extracts is probably still online somewhere, but im not sure where.
