A
city is an
urban settlement with a particularly important status which differentiates it from a
town.
City is primarily used to designate an urban settlement with a large population. However, city may also indicate a special administrative, legal, or historical status.
In the United States, "city" is primarily a legal term meaning an urban area with a degree of autonomy (i.e. a
township), rather than meaning an entire large settlement (
metropolitan area). Outside the United States, "city" implies an entire settlement or metropolitan area, although there are notable exceptions, e.g. the term
City of London. In the UK, a city is a settlement with a charter ("
letters patent") from the crown.
Overview Older cities appear to be jumbled together, seemingly without a structural plan. This quality is a legacy of earlier unplanned or organic development, and is often perceived by today's
tourists to be picturesque. In contrast, cities founded after the advent of the
automobile and planned accordingly tend to have expansive
boulevards impractical to navigate on foot.
Modern city planning has seen many different schemes for how a city should look. The most commonly seen pattern is the
grid, favoured by the Romans, almost a rule in parts of the
New World, and used for thousands of years in
China.
Derry was the first ever
planned city in Ireland, begun in 1613, with the walls being completed 5 years later in 1618. The central diamond within a walled city with four gates was thought to be a good design for defence. The grid pattern chosen was widely copied in the colonies of British North America. However, the grid has been around for far longer than the British Empire. The Ancient Greeks often gave their colonies around the Mediterranean a grid plan. One of the best examples is the city of
Priene. This city even had its different districts, much like modern city planning today. Also in Medieval times we see a preference for linear planning. Good examples are the cities established in the south of France by various rulers and city expansions in old Dutch and Flemish cities.
Other forms may include a radial structure in which main roads converge on a central point, often the effect of successive growth over long time with concentric traces of
town walls and
citadels - recently supplemented by ring-roads that take traffic around the edge of a town. Many
Dutch cities are structured this way: a central square surrounded by concentric canals. Every city expansion would imply a new circle (canals + town walls). In cities like
Amsterdam and
Haarlem, and elsewhere, such as in
Moscow, this pattern is still clearly visible.
Geography Towns and cities have a long history, although opinions vary on whether any particular
ancient settlement can be considered to be a city. Cities formed as central places of trade for the benefit of the members living there. Benefits include reduced transport costs, exchange of ideas, and sharing of natural resources. The first true towns are sometimes considered to be large settlements where the inhabitants were no longer simply farmers of the surrounding area, but began to take on specialized occupations, and where trade, food storage and power was centralized. One characteristic that can be used to distinguish a small city from a large town is organized government. A town accomplishes common goals through informal agreements between neighbors or the leadership of a chief. A city has professional administrators, regulations, and some form of taxation (food and other necessities or means to trade for them) to feed the government workers. The governments may be based on heredity, religion, military power, work projects (such as canal building), food distribution, land ownership, agriculture, commerce, manufacturing, finance, or a combination of those. Societies that live in cities are often called
civilizations. A city can also be defined as an absence of physical space between people and firms.
History By this definition, the first cities we know of were located in
Mesopotamia, such as
Eridu,
Uruk, and
Ur, and in
Egypt along the
Nile, the
Indus Valley Civilization and
China. Before this time it was rare for settlements to reach significant size, although there were exceptions such as
Jericho,
Çatalhöyük and
Mehrgarh. Among the early cities,
Mohenjo-daro of the Indus Valley Civilization was one of the largest, with an estimated population of 41,250, Similar administrative, commercial, industrial and ceremonial centres emerged in other areas, most notably
Baghdad, which to some urban historians, later became the first city to exceed a population of one million by the 8th century instead of Rome.
Ancient times During the European
Middle Ages, a town was as much a political entity as a collection of houses. City residence brought freedom from customary rural obligations to lord and community:
"Stadtluft macht frei" ("City air makes you free") was a saying in Germany. In
Continental Europe cities with a legislature of their own were not unheard of, the laws for towns as a rule other than for the countryside, the lord of a town often being another than for surrounding land. In the
Holy Roman Empire some cities had no other lord than the emperor. In
Italy,
Medieval communes had quite a statelike power.
In exceptional cases like
Venice,
Genoa or
Lübeck, cities themselves became powerful states, sometimes taking surrounding areas under their control or establishing extensive maritime empires. Similar phenomena existed elsewhere, as in the case of
Sakai, which enjoyed a considerable autonomy in late medieval Japan.
Middle Ages While the
city-states, or
poleis, of the
Mediterranean and
Baltic Sea languished from the 16th century, Europe's larger capitals benefited from the growth of commerce following the emergence of an
Atlantic trade. By the late 18th century,
London had become the largest city in the world with a population of over a million, while
Paris rivaled the well-developed regionally-traditional capital cities of
Baghdad,
Beijing,
Istanbul and
Kyoto. During the Spanish colonization of
the Americas the old Roman city concept was extensively used. Cities were founded in the middle of the newly conquered territories, and were bound to several laws about administration, finances and urbanism.
Most towns remained far smaller places, so that in 1500 only some two dozen places in the world contained more than 100,000 inhabitants: as late as 1700 there were fewer than forty, a figure which would rise thereafter to 300 in 1900. A small city of the early modern period might contain as few as 10,000 inhabitants, a town far fewer still.
Early Modern The growth of modern
industry from the late 18th century onward led to massive
urbanization and the rise of new great cities, first in Europe and then in other regions, as new opportunities brought huge numbers of
migrants from rural communities into urban areas. In the United States from 1860 to 1910, the invention of railroads reduced transportation costs, and large manufacturing centers began to emerge, thus allowing migration from rural to city areas. However, cities during those periods of time were deadly places to live in, due to health problems resulting from contaminated water and air, and communicable diseases. In the
Great Depression of the 1930s
cities were hard hit by unemployment, especially those with a base in heavy industry. In the U.S urbanization rate increased forty to eighty percent during 1900-1990. Today the world's population is slightly over half urban, with millions still streaming annually into the growing cities of
Asia,
Africa and
Latin America. There has also been a shift to suburbs, perhaps to avoid crime and traffic, which are two costs of living in an urban area.
Industrial Age Modern cities are known for creating their own
microclimates. This is due to the large clustering of hard surfaces that heat up in
sunlight and that channel
rainwater into underground ducts.
Garbage and
sewage are two major problems for cities, as is
air pollution coming from
internal combustion engines (see
public transport). The impact of cities on places elsewhere, be it hinterlands or places far away, is considered in the notion of
city footprinting (
ecological footprint). Other negative external effects include health consequences such as communicable diseases, crime, and high traffic and commuting times. Cities cause more interaction with more people than rural areas, thus a higher probability to contracting contagious diseases. However, many inventions such as inoculations, vaccines, and water filtration systems have also lowered health concerns.
Crime is also a concern in the cities. Studies have shown that crime rates in cities are higher and the chance of punishment after getting caught is lower. In cases such as burglary, the higher concentration of people in cities create more items of higher value worth the risk of crime. The high concentration of people also create
traffic problems and higher commute times, causing less time to be spent on more valuable activities.
External Effects The difference between
towns and
cities is differently understood in different parts of the
English speaking world. There is no one standard international definition of a city: the term may be used either for a town possessing city status; for an urban locality exceeding an arbitrary population size; for a town dominating other towns with particular regional economic or administrative significance. Although
city can refer to an
agglomeration including
suburban and satellite areas, the term is not usually applied to a
conurbation (cluster) of
distinct urban places, nor for a wider
metropolitan area including more than one city, each acting as a focus for parts of the area.
The difference between towns and cities Main article: City status in the United Kingdom United Kingdom In
Australia and
New Zealand,
city is used to refer both to units of local government, and as a synonym for urban area. For instance the City of South Perth is part of the urban area known as
Perth, commonly described as a city. On the other hand,
Gisborne is known as the first city to see the sun, despite being administered by a district council, not a city council.
Australia and New Zealand This article has been tagged since December 2006. In most U.S. states, a city is designated by the election of a mayor and city council, while a town is governed by people, select board (or board of trustees), or open town meeting. There are some very large towns (such as
Hempstead, New York, with a population of 755,785 in 2004) and some very small cities (such as
Shafer, Minnesota, with a population of 343 in 2000), and the line between town and city, if it exists at all, varies from state to state. Cities in the United States do have many oddities, like
Maza, North Dakota, the smallest city in the country, has only 5 inhabitants, but is still incorporated. It does not have an active government, and the mayoral hand changes frequently (due to the lack of city laws), but it is considered a relatively inactive government.
In many U.S. states, any incorporated town is also called a city. If a distinction is being made between towns and cities, exactly what that distinction is often depends on the context. The context will differ depending on whether the issue is the legal authority it possesses, the availability of shopping and entertainment, and the scope of the group of places under consideration. Intensifiers such as "small town" and "big city" are also common, though the flip side of each is rarely used.
Some states also make a distinction between
villages and other forms of municipalities. Even though Americans are aware that "village" means something smaller than a town, the word has often been co-opted by enterprising developers to make their projects sound welcoming and friendly. The results are villages with 20 and 30-story high-rises, like
Westwood Village in
Los Angeles. Another well-known example of an urban village is New York City's famed
Greenwich Village, which started as a quiet country settlement but was absorbed by the growing city.
In all the
New England states, city status is conferred by the form of government, not population. Town government has a board of
selectmen for the
executive branch, and a
town meeting for the
legislative branch. New England cities, on the other hand, have a
mayor for the executive, and a legislature referred to as either the city council or the board of
aldermen.
In
Virginia, all incorporated municipalities designated as cities are
independent of the adjacent or surrounding county while a town is an incorporated municipality which remains a part of an adjacent or surrounding county. The largest incorporated municipalities by population are all cities, although some smaller cities have a smaller population than some towns. For example, the smallest city of
Norton has a population of 3,904 and the largest town of
Blacksburg has a population of 39,573.
United States In many other languages, there is no difference between
city and
town. The German word for both is
Stadt, while a town with more than 100,000 inhabitants is called a
Großstadt, which is the most adequate equivalence for
city (in terms of differentiating it from a town).
Germany There is a formal definition of
city in
China provided by the Chinese government. For an urban area that can be defined as a
city, there should be at least 100,000 non-agricultural population.
City with less than 200,000 non-agricultural population refers to a Small city, 200,000-500,000 non-agricultural population is a Medium city, 500,000-1,000,000 non-agricultural population is a Large city and >1,000,000 non-agricultural population is an Extra-large city. Also, there is an administrative definition based on the city boundary too and a city has its legal city limits. In 1998, there were 668 cities in China - China has the largest urban population in the world.
China Chile's Department of National Statistics defines a city (
ciudad in Spanish) as an
urban entity with more than 5,000 inhabitants. A town (
pueblo), is an urban entity with 2,001 to 5,000 persons, however, if the area has some economic activity, the designation may include populations as small as 1,001. The department also defines Major Cities as provincial or regional capitals with populations of 100,001 to 500,000; Great Urban Areas which are comprised of several entities without any appreciable limit between them and populations which total between 500,001 and 1,000,000. A
Metropolis is the largest urban area in the country where there are more than one million inhabitants. The "urban entity" is defined as a concentration of habitations with more than 2,000 persons living in them, or more than 1,000 persons if more than half of those persons are in some way gainfully employed.
Tourist and
recreation areas with more than 250 living units may be considered as urban areas.
Chile Main article: Global City Global cities Main article: Inner city Inner city Citistate World's Most Livable Cities Large Cities Climate Leadership Group Names of European cities in different languages Urban culture Urban sociology Ekistics Lost city Shrinking Cities Principles of Intelligent Urbanism
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