I guess I’m a bit late to the party but as someone who almost exclusively maps Karlova Ves I thought I’d weigh in. Firstly I’m really happy this thread exists and that someone is talking about this as all these are are things I was struggling with when I started mapping Karlovka. (I might be giving myself too much credit here but I’d say roughly half of the park spam is from me :p). In short my reasoning for tagging the greenery as parks was threefold:

1. It was done in some other places such as Ruzinov so I followed (I know this defense did’t work at Nuremberg trials)
2. A lot of the greenery and “vnutroblok” space was intended as microparks from the get-go so they actually are “parks”, even though it is not the standard “western” definition of a park
3. landuse=grass doesn’t apply without mentioning the trees, landuse=forest doesnt fit at all (I remember quite a lot of greenery having this tag) and micromapping would be tedious.

So I kinda accepted the park spam as a tradeoff, with the intention of micromapping it some time later. Where applicable (no trees) I used landuse=grass and that was that.

So overall I’m quite happy someone is finally up to the task of mapping the trees more accuratelly and I’m giving my full support.

Maybe one suggestion would be to still tag the whole area in-between the square types of blocks as parks as this was something intentionally meant by the architects and the municipality continues to refer to them as such till this day. [1] [2]

As with the sedum tram tracks, I went through the painful search for good tag a year or two back and came up empty handed as well (this thread has been so validating for me as everything mentioned is something I’ve scoured the wiki for ages to find something fitting). Anyhow I might make a wiki page for sedum and see if it catches on, as it seems there is a hole in the tags for this kind of thing.

TLDR: the feeble american minds that created OSM could not have comprehended not living in asphalt desert or suberb