How big is a town? How small are cities?

[Arwon]

Trying to get a sense of people's mental urban geographies.

From my point of view (and this is talking about urban or metropolitan areas not administrative boundaries because local government boundaries are often very stupid) I think the transition from town to city is somewhere around the 50k to 100k mark. Any independent urban/metro area below 50k isn't a city, anything above 100k isn't a town.

 

[Narz]

I think it depends more on the feel of a place than the population. 50k densely centered in a downtown is going to feel more cityish than 100k all spread out.

 

[Synobun]

Based on where I grew up, anything over 19,000 was a city. I lived in a town of 2000~ people, with the two other nearest settlements being a village of 400~ and a town of 4000~. The nearest city, 19,000-20,000, was a 35 minute drive away.

 

[AppleDumplingHead]

I don't know that "city" has a sort of legal or concrete definition. I know "town" has a definite legal definition, and is a legal municipality. I'd guess a "city" is a conglomeration of multiple such municipalities with a single over-seeing council and jurisdiction. Cities generally, as they spread, encompass and annex smaller municipalities, but in rare cases, citizens of one area might elect to remove themselves, if they feel they have the capacity to be self-sustaining.

So I don't think it's a population issue as much as a joint association of towns to form one municipality. A city can have 25k people spread over many square miles, or a city can have several million people. It's like asking, "How many people must there be to form a country?".

 

[Flying Pig]

In Britain we're a bit vague: the traditional saying is that a city has a cathedral, but the city of Cambridge doesn't, and the town of Rochester does (admittedly, there's a story there). Cambridge has roughly the same population (120,000) as Cheltenham, which is a town. If I were looking at a map or trying to come to terms with a totally unfamiliar place, I suppose there would be something in how divisible it was: a place like London, which can only really be understood or dealt with as a lot of smaller bits joined together, is much more clearly a 'city'.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

In terms of legal definitions the distinguishing characteristic is organizational, not population. But that doesn't address the question asked.

As Narz already pointed out, there's a feel that also is not a function of size. It also isn't just a matter of densities. I think the most important factor might come down to relativity.

I live in a city (it is incorporated, has a city charter) of 150,000 or so. It feels like a town, and it would still feel like a town if it had half a million people and was densely urban. I know, because Long Beach does have half a million people and is densely urban and it still feels like a town. The reason these places will never feel like cities is because they will never get out of the shadow of Los Angeles. Our "local" television stations are Los Angeles stations (yes, the cable companies have dedicated "local" channels that no one watches, mostly they carry the city council meetings). Our local newspapers are Los Angeles papers (yes, Long Beach and Palmdale both have their own papers that are read by far fewer residents than get the LA Times). Most of our citizens when asked where we are from by anyone not within 200 miles will say "Los Angeles" because it's just easier.

So for a city to feel like a city it has to be the city for at least some reasonable distance.

 

[Kyriakos]

I think it intuitively makes sense to go with > (or near) 100.000=city.

Although here we don't have those terms, we use Polis (since antiquity) while the smaller types are less used up until you get to a large village-type settlement.
Afaik the most common term for the analogous immediately smaller settlement is a term using "polis" along with a type of connotative diminutive infront of it. Besides, Polis etymologically just refers to people organised there as a distinct community. Eg Plataea probably had less than 5K citizens but was termed a Polis in ancient Greece.

 

[Arwon]

I don't know that "city" has a sort of legal or concrete definition. I know "town" has a definite legal definition, and is a legal municipality. I'd guess a "city" is a conglomeration of multiple such municipalities with a single over-seeing council and jurisdiction. Cities generally, as they spread, encompass and annex smaller municipalities, but in rare cases, citizens of one area might elect to remove themselves, if they feel they have the capacity to be self-sustaining.

So I don't think it's a population issue as much as a joint association of towns to form one municipality. A city can have 25k people spread over many square miles, or a city can have several million people. It's like asking, "How many people must there be to form a country?".

I don't think that having multiple constituent municipalities which place annexed really works as a distinction. It assumes a particular model of urban development, with the pre-existence of surrounding municipalities to annex.

And similarly, plenty of cities don't actually have a single overarching authority. Who's the overarching authority of Los Angeles? The Mayor is only responsible for the City of Los Angeles, not the whole thing. Sydney's Lord Mayor is mayor of about 100k people in the centre of a city of 4.5 million. There's no boss of Sydney as a whole - the New South Wales government wouldn't want the rival power base.

Many cities are a single large municipal government, but I'm not sure all of them grew by annexation.

Others have separate municipalities, sure, but undoubtedly grew as a single city - Australian cities generally expanded from a single settlement, rather than by subsuming many surrounding towns... because those never existed.

Some cities don't even have any municipal government as such, but are administered as separate top-level subnational government divisions. This is often the case with New World national capitals... Mexico has its Distrito Federal, Washington DC has the District of Columbia, my own city is the Australian Capital Territory.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Trying to get a sense of people's mental urban geographies.

From my point of view (and this is talking about urban or metropolitan areas not administrative boundaries because local government boundaries are often very stupid) I think the transition from town to city is somewhere around the 50k to 100k mark. Any independent urban/metro area below 50k isn't a city, anything above 100k isn't a town.

My city took over the 3rd-largest in the province (measured by population) from Lethbridge, and it's a mixed blessing. There's a little bit of pride ("My city is bigger than yours, nyaah!"), but with more people come more problems. Red Deer is so close to the middle between Edmonton and Calgary (geographically) that it's pointless to say that either large city is closer than the other. This makes for interesting rivalries; back in 1987, I went to Spokane, Washington with a friend from Calgary to meet Sylvester McCoy (the then-new Doctor Who; the actor was touring the American PBS stations to meet the fans and gain publicity for the show) and the station manager told us, "There's four fellas here from Edmonton, maybe y'all know each other!"

Yeah, right. My friend rolled her eyes, but I said it was possible that we might have met them at some convention or other... nope. Four complete strangers. And then I had to listen to the "my city is better than yours" bickering (it was friendly bickering, not as bad as when rival hockey fans get together). When asked my opinion by one of the guys (he assumed I was from Calgary), I told him, "I'm from Red Deer and I'm staying out of this."

Where I'm going with this is that my concept of "city" has been measured in terms of where I live, and how it compares to the two nearest cities and how they relate to each other. I've lived near or in Red Deer all my life, except for extended holidays in British Columbia (Okanagan region, in and near Vernon. I remember being a little kid (about 4 or 5) and just having learned to read... driving my mom nuts as I insisted on reading every road sign out loud when we drove into town from the acreage. "Red Deer pop. 26,000... Mom, what does that mean?"

"It means there are 26,000 people in Red Deer."

Twenty-six thousand people seemed like a huge number to me back in the late 1960s. We're over 100,000 now, and there are times when I wish at least half of them would leave. This city is too damn big. There are neighborhoods I've never seen other than as names on a map, and some of them are built on land that I do remember used to be productive farmland. Even the acreage I grew up on was eventually swallowed up by the city and the whole thing is paved over. The gardens we had, the woods, the wetlands... it's all under asphalt.

the traditional saying is that a city has a cathedral

By this definition, a lot of North American cities wouldn't be considered cities. We have Catholic churches here, but nothing resembling a cathedral.

 

[Arwon]

In terms of legal definitions the distinguishing characteristic is organizational, not population. But that doesn't address the question asked.

As Narz already pointed out, there's a feel that also is not a function of size. It also isn't just a matter of densities. I think the most important factor might come down to relativity.

I live in a city (it is incorporated, has a city charter) of 150,000 or so. It feels like a town, and it would still feel like a town if it had half a million people and was densely urban. I know, because Long Beach does have half a million people and is densely urban and it still feels like a town. The reason these places will never feel like cities is because they will never get out of the shadow of Los Angeles. Our "local" television stations are Los Angeles stations (yes, the cable companies have dedicated "local" channels that no one watches, mostly they carry the city council meetings). Our local newspapers are Los Angeles papers (yes, Long Beach and Palmdale both have their own papers that are read by far fewer residents than get the LA Times). Most of our citizens when asked where we are from by anyone not within 200 miles will say "Los Angeles" because it's just easier.

So for a city to feel like a city it has to be the city for at least some reasonable distance.

I'm sorry to tell you this, but by any sensible viewpoint Long Beach is a part of Los Angeles just as Randwick is part of Sydney or Hackney is part of London.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Who's the overarching authority of Los Angeles?

Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. While the mayors and city councils aren't as directly bound as the unincorporated areas of the county are, that would be the highest authority in most situations.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I'm sorry to tell you this, but by any sensible viewpoint Long Beach is a part of Los Angeles just as Randwick is part of Sydney or Hackney is part of London.

Why are you sorry to tell me what I basically already said? However, sensible viewpoint aside, Long Beach has a mayor, a city charter, a city hall, a budget, their own police and fire departments, and is in every structural and economic measure a city.

 

[Arwon]

Why are you sorry to tell me what I basically already said? However, sensible viewpoint aside, Long Beach has a mayor, a city charter, a city hall, a budget, their own police and fire departments, and is in every structural and economic measure a city.

See, Randwick has all of those except cops and firefighters and that's because our emergency services are run at a State level. But that doesn't mean Randwick is a city in any sense other than "the local council is called The City of Randwick*". It's just part of Sydney.

(This is why I said local government administrative boundaries are frequently stupid. They have little to do with where the real city reaches to)

*some Sydney municipalities are called a Shire or Municipality rather than a City and this confers no difference of status. Similarly some indisputably country areas are called a City in their local government - the City of Shoalhaven is a dozen independent small towns interspersed with farms and national park. It's a rural local government area that just calls itself a City.

 

[Arwon]

Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. While the mayors and city councils aren't as directly bound as the unincorporated areas of the county are, that would be the highest authority in most situations.

But even that doesn't cover Riverside or San Bernadino or Orange or Ventura.

 

[Cutlass]

I think it's more situational than can be strictly defined. I'm in Connecticut, a state with no major cities. But several places we call cities. But then the towns here can be pretty big, with 50-70,000 people in something which is called a town, rather than a city. Those places called cities are over 100k population. But if you go a bit north to Maine, the largest 'city' has 66,000. And there are a number of states that don't even get to that population in a single municipality. Vermont's largest city has 42,000, which is 10,000 less than the town I live in. In both those states the capital city is under 20k in population.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I'm not suggesting that they aren't stupid, just acknowledging that they do exist.

They also serve a purpose. When I was ticked off about how certain things were being done at the local landfill I went to city hall and talked to the guy who handles the city contract with Waste Management Corporation, who runs the landfill. I talk to the mayor regularly enough that even though he probably doesn't know my name off the top of his head he does recognize me. The woman in the public safety department that manages Palmdale's contract with the LA County Sheriff's Department actually DOES know my name off the top of her head. If the entirety of Los Angeles were managed under a single city administration none of those things would be likely to be true.

 

[AppleDumplingHead]

I don't think that having multiple constituent municipalities which place annexed really works as a distinction. It assumes a particular model of urban development, with the pre-existence of surrounding municipalities to annex.

And similarly, plenty of cities don't actually have a single overarching authority. Who's the overarching authority of Los Angeles? The Mayor is only responsible for the City of Los Angeles, not the whole thing. Sydney's Lord Mayor is mayor of about 100k people in the centre of a city of 4.5 million. There's no boss of Sydney as a whole - the New South Wales government wouldn't want the rival power base.

Many cities are a single large municipal government, but I'm not sure all of them grew by annexation.

Others have separate municipalities, sure, but undoubtedly grew as a single city - Australian cities generally expanded from a single settlement, rather than by subsuming many surrounding towns... because those never existed.

Some cities don't even have any municipal government as such, but are administered as separate top-level subnational government divisions. This is often the case with New World national capitals... Mexico has its Distrito Federal, Washington DC has the District of Columbia, my own city is the Australian Capital Territory.

I think, for USA at least, you're conflating "city of" with "CSA" and "MSA". For example, most larger cities have what's referred as a "greater metropolitan area" or "metropolitan statistical area", but the whole area, particularly to non-natives, is referred as "Los Angeles" or "Chicago" or "Houston" or "Philadelphia", which are actually a number of smaller, outlying cities/towns. These fall into a third category of city structure, "metropolis". A guy from Arlington Heights, Illinois passes into Bowlingbrook Illinois, and he knows these are two municipalities, but a guy from Germany pretty much sees, and calls, the whole thing as "Chicago".

The city in which I live has a number of these, as a matter of fact when I try to think of them all, I forget some, and they're all distinct municipalities, but the greater area includes smaller cites, towns, villages. You blink and you drive into the next one.

 

[Arwon]

Lol I've been to Vermont it doesn't have cities.

Connecticut is also partly in the New York metro area so there's that.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

But even that doesn't cover Riverside or San Bernadino or Orange or Ventura.

With the exception of Orange County none of those have any reason to be under any common authority with Los Angeles. Why would they be?

 

[Vectors]

Trying to get a sense of people's mental urban geographies.

From my point of view (and this is talking about urban or metropolitan areas not administrative boundaries because local government boundaries are often very stupid) I think the transition from town to city is somewhere around the 50k to 100k mark. Any independent urban/metro area below 50k isn't a city, anything above 100k isn't a town.

I personally feel that it depends on density and size relative to the area, if it is only 30k, but is the centre of an area it could be called a city especially if it is relatively dense and in a small country whereas if it is all sprawled out and lacks a core it might not seem like a city even at 100k.

The San Francisco Bay Area has San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose of which San Jose is the biggest by a fair bit so it could be considered a core of a metropolitan area in its own right given it has over a million people. Oakland is much smaller than either at 400k, but it has enough of its own commerce, industry and downtown that while it is definitely part of the SFBA it is a city in its own right and not a suburb. Contrast this with the Greater Toronto Area which has two cities called Brampton and Mississauga which are ~600k and ~700k respectively, but these while cities are still "suburbs" because they are bedroom communities where people mostly go into Toronto for work.

But even that doesn't cover Riverside or San Bernadino or Orange or Ventura.

The OC is sort of part of LA and sort of not. The others are weird to call part of LA