User:Bart Terpstra/Places of residence in the Netherlands

A place of residence is a designation for a human settlement, as is common for postal adressing. It is part of the adress of a building. A full adress in The Netherlands consists of a place of residence, street and housenumber. The adress is meant to identify the buildings, of importance for, among other things, mailderlivery, police and emergency services. The populationregistar keeps track of of every person's adress with a regular place of residence.

Places of recidence Residences in the Netherlands can be cities but also villages or hamlets. It is a matter of local tradition which of these three one chooses.

Places without residential status are called hamlets in the Netherlands. A hamlet is part of another place for postal addressing.

Subdivision
In The Netherlands, municipalites determine how their area is subdivided into places of residence. Also the further subdivision into streets and housenumbers is a matter for the municipality. The registration of buildings takes place in a national system: the Basic registration of Addresses en Buildings (BAG) which is managed by the Kadaster.

Borders
Part of this system is also the establishment of boundaries between residences. This should be such that no areas remain, including areas without buildings, that do not belong to any residence. A residence need not be a contiguous area, but may consist of more than one area. This is the case, for example, with the domicile of Amsterdam. Until 2014, Amsterdam Zuidoost was a residence, which was not adjacent to the residence of Amsterdam. Since 2014, Zuidoost has been a part of the domicile of Amsterdam, which consists of two areas that are not adjacent to each other. Large municipalities generally divide their areas into districts and neighborhoods. However, this division is not part of the official addressing and thus does not appear in the BAG.

Municipality
The making of a subdivision by a municipality of its area into residences is the competence of the municipal council. There are no rules for this. Municipalities apply different policies in this regard. For example, when the municipality of Enschede expanded eastward, it abolished the residence of Glanerbrug and made it part of the residence of Enschede from that moment on. Things were different in the municipality of Utrecht after the annexation of the neighboring municipality of Vleuten-De Meern. The municipality of Utrecht before the annexation consisted of one residence. Although it was considered to annex Vleuten-De Meern to the city of Utrecht, this did not happen and there are now four residences within this municipality.

Cores
In rural areas, some municipalities consist of dozens of residential centers. Again, the municipality can bundle them into residential towns at will. Generally, for practical reasons, small settlements are grouped with larger settlements, but there is no law requiring this.

Number of settlements in The Netherlands
The development of the number of residences in the Netherlands in recent years is shown in the table below. It shows that although the number of municipalities in the Netherlands is decreasing, the number of residences remains roughly the same.  See the cateogory Maps of BAG woonplaatsen of Wikimedia Commons for media files about this subject