Prompted by a comment chain I saw in another thread. What would you say is your countries approximate limits for calling something a city vs a town or something rural.
I live in norway in a place between 25-35k that’s considered a city but everyone back home in mexico thinks its a small town (pueblo or commonly called pueblito).
My hometown in mexico is about between 190-300k (city vs metropolitan) and most people nationwide would consider it a small city so obviously there is some cultural disconnect.
Curious to see the range of answers
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German doesn’t distinguish between town and city. Both are called “Stadt”. We then habe the term “Großstadt” meaning big city and the limit for Großstadt is 100,000 inhabitants.
Smaller than “Stadt” is “Dorf” which translates to village. There is no clear cutoff. Historically it used to be about certain legal rights like building fortifications and holding markets. Today the distinction is pretty blurry but I would set the cutoff somewhere around 5,000 inhabitants.
Honestly, “city” here in Belgium refers more to how dense the place is rather than the population as a whole.
The place I was born would be called a city by everyone.
The place I moved to after has a bigger population but spread out over 2 “centers” and much more area. So a lot more farmland, horses, etc. etc. Both of those centers would be labeled as towns.
This is because for example “Gent” can be both the city of Gent as well as Gent + like 13 towns surrounding it, all in Gent. So yea, you sometimes have to ask for clarification what “Gent” or “Brugge” or whatever a person means.
So my second place had one main town + a small town that’s also part of it. Added together they’re a bigger population than the city I was born in but neither apart or together are they a city.
Ballparking it, 15-20k is a city but it’s not about what city or town they belong to, but about those living in a small place and in a densely populated area.
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Some people consider a city is a city when it has city rights. City rights where granted during the medieval ages. There is even a city of only 30 inhabitants, but probably some natives might insist to call it a city.
However, nowadays I think a city is a city has some importance for a certain region. Often a city has a number of features like a hospital, a university (of applied science), a cultural scene like a theatre and cinema. I think size is less important. I think you will find cities of 50k people in the northern and eastern part of the country while settlements with the same size serves a commuters towns in the more populated western part of the country.
Town here is usually with more than 2k inhabitants (more or less, it’s not that strict). Maybe a regional capital would be a city here, but there’s no official distinguishing between a town and a city.
I generally think that what constitutes urbanity—as I also said in the comment chain—you’re referring to, has to be defined through socio-historical analysis. For me, working academically, with urbanism, the term constitutes a specific social space, which is defined by masses (e.g. a certain density of population,) a production distinct from rural forms of production (e.g. large scale industrial production, factory production, and financial ‘production,’ and a space meant for exchange of commodities; i.e. a certain relation to a market. Though this is ofc. not applicable in a transhistorical, or transsocial, manner. Take for example the (metro)polises of antiquity, which were urban spaces largely dominated by the rural, by rural production, through the general slave-based (despotic) mode of production, e.g. the villa-system. But to take a line from Henri Lefebvre’s book, _The Production of Space_:
**”**_(Social) space is a (social) product_**”**
In terms of official statistics, in Denmark, any settlement with more than 200 inhabitants and with less than 200 metres between is considered a ‘_by_’, a town or a city. Though, in my opinion, this does not necessarily mean that it’s an urban space. And there isn’t a specific line of population, where, e.g. 8567 inhabitants means that _now_ you have an urban space, while below that line, it’s rural.
That’s hard to say, since we have no official figures available for how many people live in every place, we only have those for municipalities. So to take for example the municipality of Rotterdam isn’t just the city of Rotterdam alone, for example Hoek van Holland, a place with around 10.000 inhabitants is also part of the municipality of Rotterdam.
We have no difference between city and town. Instead, there’s term taajama, which translates as “urban area” or “conurbation”. A bit simplified, taajama is defined as a settlement cluster with at least 200 residents, where the distance between residential buildings is at max 200 metres. Outside these is then haja-asutusalue aka rural area.
One practical effect: within taajama, the driving speed limit is by default 50, unless indicated otherwise.
A place could be legaly declared a city with “stadsprivilegier” by the King up untill 1971 while the last city to be declared that was in 1951.
Now we just define a city as anything with 10,000 inhabitants or more aswell as citys with less if they had stadsprivilegier once upon a time.
We don’t have those words.
A city is considered a city from 5000 residents.
But we have so much fun suffixes noone uses!
Dwarfvillage! <200.
Tinytown! (Or tinyvillage, that sounds worse) <500
Smallvillage! 500-999.
Község! No english equivalent for that as far as I and google know. <5000.
Smallcity! <20.000
Mediumcity! <100.000
Bigcity! >100.000
Metropolisz! >1.000.000.
In the UK city status is pretty much just ceremonial and is awarded by the reigning monarch, population doesn’t come into it (there’s a city in Wales with around 1800 people). Every now and again (e.g. when the queen got to 50 years on the job or whatever) they’ll upgrade a handful of towns to cities, generally one in each part of the UK. Despite what plenty of folk over 50 seem to think, it’s got nothing to do with having a cathedral or not.
Historically Scotland never really had cities (“royal burghs” were the closest equivalent) so technically we only got our first city in 1889.
Smaller than a town would be a village, but it’s not so much down to population as it is to do with facilities/services/local influence. After that you’ve got a hamlet/clachan, which is pretty much just a handful of houses near each other with no churches, post offices etc.
Rural is generally used to refer to the general area rather than anything to do with the population, so you’ll get rural towns, villages etc.
It’s not entirely down to number of people, but if I had to give numbers, I’d say a city, in my mind, would be like 250,000+, and a town probably like 20,000+. Let’s say 25,000+ for the esthetics. Village is laxer. Let’s say two decades lower, so 250+.
Technically I think everything above 10k is a city in Switzerland and as somebody already said German doesn’t distuingish between town and city. But i would refer to anything below 100k as a town, above as a city.
our language doesn’t make any difference between town and city.
Number of people has nothing to do with that,historical city rights has. So we have city as small as 77 people (and almost 100 cities with population less than 1000) and villages with more than 5000 people
cities start at 500 thousand residents, anything less is a town
Ireland;
The countryside is defined by when you start using the backdoor to enter someone’s house
Well according to law a city has at least 40.000 residents, a town at least 10.000 and a rural municipality at least 1500.
Personally if I can walk from one end to the other without really getting tired it’s a town. My home town is somewhere around 30k and if i don’t know the person I 100% know their parent, sibling or first cousin and there’s a one in five chance we are related.
Sweden have no official designation for village, town, city, etc…
**Officially** it is:
* *Ort* (“locality”) for less than 200 inhabitants.
* *Tätort* (“dense locality”) for more than 200 inhabitants.
* *Centralort* (“central locality”) for the locality which is responsible for the local administration, I.E. contain the Municipal Hall.
In **colloquial** speech, though, we still use village, town, and city. The specifics varies slightly from person to person, but according to me:
* *By* (“village”) any place with a few buildings (ca. +10).
* *Samhälle* (“community/town”) at least a few hundred population. Has its own grocery store and a few industries.
* *Stad* (“town/city”) has to be the central locality of the municipality, with responsibility over the surrounding area. Population wise it should be larger than circa 10’000.
* *Storstad* (“metropolis”) exclusively Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö. If I had to give a number I would say above 300’000 population, but that is solely because I see Malmö as the lower limit.
You say we call a place between 25-35k a “city”, but that’s not correct. We use the word “by”, but we use that for anything between ~10k and 50 million. So it doesn’t make sense to translate “by” to “city”. Sometimes it’s town and sometimes it’s metropolis. It’s far from a direct translation.
I would put the line in croatia to about 20-30k, but technically, thre is no limit and there are some historic towns with mere hundreds of people today. There are only three or four cities with more than 100k people so there is no much room for many classifications. I would mostly judge them and divide them by amenities and services they have. Is there a hospital? Movie theatre? Faculty or a good highschool?
It has nothing to do with size.
Cities (*ciudades*) were given that privilege by the king (or whoever) with several tax and commerce concessions awarded to their citizens. Lugo, for example, at about 90k inhabitants, was made capital of the Roman province over 2,000 years ago by Augustus itself, as preserved in the foundational monoliths (**Vrbis** Conditori Augusto Monumentum Caesaris), so they won’t care about their or your size.
Next are towns (*villas*), also awarded several privileges, like hosting markets.
Next, *pueblos* and *aldeas*, as well as other entities, receive their name according to their position in the exploitation of the landscape and a hierarchy that goes back thousands of years to tribal allegiances (mostly related to the defensive association of hill forts).
New developments out of these areas avoid any traditional territorial nomenclature and use newer concepts (*barriada, polígono*,…).
I have a degree in history, and because of that I tend to define a city based on the character and function of a settlement rather than population size. It makes very little sense to say that a city of 50 000 people isn’t a city when it would be considered huge in the medieval period, for example. People will refer to late 15th century Cologne as a city without batting an eye, but then insist that a modern city with 5 times more people isn’t a “real city” because it has “only” 200 000 people in it.
A city, to me, is a dense settlement where the majority of people are not employed in the primary sector, i.e most people don’t work in food production, and it has a distinct center (or multiple centers) where commercial activity (business, shopping, trading) takes place.
A city of 50 000 people doesn’t stop being a city just because larger cities like Tokyo and NYC exist.
The only official distinction is 2k people. Less than 2k it’s a village, more than 2k is a city. I think there might be a a difference when a city have arrondissements, but I don’t know the requirements.
Then for what people consider rural or not…. It mostly depends of where you grew up.
I live in a village of 600 people, and anything bigger than 5k people is fairly bigw and 20k is a big city, while I’ve met people living in a 50k city who considers it small.
(My unofficial requirement for rurality is the access to public transport. If the only buses are school buses, it’s rural)
The rules in the UK are a little prone to fluctuation and change, but mostly it follows this pattern:
– City – a settlement given a royal charter by the monarch. This is why the UK has so few cities (barely 50 or 60) and numerous places with 6-figure populations which are only towns. Historically the rule was that any settlement where a bishop had their cathedral would be granted a royal charter, but in the last few centuries this ceased to be the case.
– Town – a settlement with at least one main road serving as a shopping area
– Village – a settlement with a village green around which the village is traditionally centred, and generally possessing at least one pub. As it has no real shops if substance, you can anticipate that these generally have population barely in the hundreds, maybe in the dozens
– Hamlet – a settlement possessing none of the above. Rarely exceeds a population of 50, may have a population more like 5
In Ireland they’re legally defined based on the structure of their local government.
Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Galway and Waterford are defined as cities. Everything else is a town.
There are a few places that were historical cities, but they’re not in the modern sense of the definition e.g. Kilkenny. Then you’ve also got places that just call themselves cities for aspirational reasons, like Sligo.
Ireland’s local government structures are pretty useless and impotent.
Towns have no town hall / local government. They’re just urban districts in an amorphous county councils that cover a big rural area. They don’t even have town mayors anymore. For some reason we abolished the concept of Town Councils in 2014, which in my view anyway, was a major erosion of local democracy here and contrary to the EU/Council of Europe aims towards having subsidiarity – power wielded as close to local as possible.
Ireland’s way, way too centralised and the city and county councils are very lacking in autonomy, local financial control or any kind of powers compared to anything almost anywhere else in Europe. They don’t even run their own public transit systems. Everything’s done by various national quangos. Our solution to everything seems to be to create another national body and roll it all into that instead.