Assuming your country differentiates between town and city, otherwise, the question is when does a village become a city.
I know many countries have different rules. Some measure by population while others measure by other things (Eg if there’s a cathedral)
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When it becomes a first-level administrative division (municipality), separate from the area surrounding it.
In Denmark the marker between some houses close together and a town (by) is 200 inhabitants. There is no official differences for towns larger than that.
Some towns are called market towns (købstad) but that is purely a historical designation for towns with the right to have a market.
Legally there isn’t really towns and cities in Finland. The smallest division is a municipality, and any municipality can choose to call itself a city or not. I think the smallest municipality that calls itself a city is Kaskinen, which has about 1000 inhabitants, and the largest municipality that doesn’t is Nurmijärvi, which has about 50k.
In colloquial language we mostly make a distinction between a village (*kylä*) and a city (*kaupunki*), but where the line between them is not something you can put your finger on.
We don’t exactly have a distinction between a town and a city. Polish “miasto” can have 500 000 thousand people, as well as 1000 people – and it is decided by the “regional, economic and historical reasons”.
However we have 66 “cities on the right of the county” (miasto na prawach powiatu) – which is usually bigger and more important city, which was separated from the surrounding cities, villages and other settlements grouped in the “land county”, due to the governing efficiency.
In my opinions – those 66 cities are THE cities in Poland, while the rest would be considered “towns”.
We don’t have a difference between a town and a city. So there’s a bunch of rules for a village to become a city you can find here:
[https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_miasta_w_Polsce_wsp%C3%B3%C5%82cze%C5%9Bnie](https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_miasta_w_Polsce_wsp%C3%B3%C5%82cze%C5%9Bnie)
A British town becomes a city when it is granted letters patent from the monarch conferring city status upon it.
There isn’t a definite separation.
Also, town/city are just how people call a place, there isn’t a national rule that says “all towns with more than 10k inhabitants are cities”.
We have Capoluogo di Regione, Capoluogo di Provincia, Comune, Frazione, and that’s about how local administration works.
You can have a very big Comune that isn’t a Capoluogo di Provincia in a densely populated area, and a smaller city as a Capoluogo di Regione because there are just mountains in the area and the most important city is that one.
In German, there is no difference between ‘town’ and “city”; both are translated as ‘Stadt’.
In Austria, statistically speaking, a place with over 10,000 inhabitants is considered a city. Legally speaking, however, this is not necessarily the case, as some smaller towns have city rights for historical reasons, mostly dating back to the Middle Ages, and on the other hand, there are larger towns that do not want to be cities, but prefer to be ‘market towns’ or villages. Legally speaking, this is irrelevant nowadays. The largest municipality that is not a city is Lustenau, with about 25,000 inhabitants. They could become a city at any time, but they prefer to be the largest market town in the country rather than the 21st largest city. The largest village is Wals-Siezenheim, with about 15,000 inhabitants. They could also become a city, but prefer to be the largest village in the country – statistically speaking, they count as a city, but not legally.
Legal status. As in there is an actual law (Loi communale du 13 décembre 1988) which lists the towns that have the right to call themselves cities. There’s 12 currently, of which 8 have been cities historically by virtue of having a town charter bestowed on them by a monarch.
In Serbia, a city is defined by law as a unit of local self-government that represents the economic, administrative, geographical and cultural center of a wider area, and which usually has more than 100,000 inhabitants. Exceptionally, a city can be declared with fewer inhabitants if there are special economic, geographical or historical reasons.
Currently, there are 28 cities in Serbia plus Belgrade, which has a special status. Bor and Prokuplje were the newest additions and they became cities in 2018.
Legally there is no seperation: all the territory is divided into municipalities (communes in France).
INSEE (the French office for statistics) does have a classification based on density:
* Densly populated communes (these are city centers, basically)
* Medium urban centers (a commune that is surrounded by other urban communes who are all medium in terms of density)
* Urban belts (a commune that is within the vacinity of a densly populated commune)
* Small cities (a commune with a medium density but not surrounded by other urban communes)
* Rural towns (a sparsly populated commune with a centrality)
* Dispersed Rural habitat (a sparsly populated commune without centrality)
* Very dispersed Rural habitat (an almost unpopulated commune, and yes for the record there has been communes whose population reached zero)
In the Netherlands a town needs to have special rights, called City Rights. Because of this there are some relatively small towns that have small a small population but are officially cities. An example is the city of Bronkhorst. It gained City Rights in 1482 and there are 150 people living there.
For comparison, Hoofddorp (coincidentally “dorp” means village) has 78,000 inhabitants, but it is officially a village.
There’s no longer any formal difference in Sweden. It’s also a bit tricky because we only have two words for it Stad (both city and town) and By (both town and village). A quick Google says the informal limit for a Stad/City is a population of 10,000, but I know some smaller places that are still considered cities because of their history.
There is no differentiation. It’s mainly based on medieval ‘city rights’, modern ‘feeling’ or communication.
I mean there is Staverden, 50 inhabitants which is a city based on medieval rights.
Almere founded in the 1970s of course never received medieval city rights, but it has > 210k inhabitants, so it must be a city
When the king says it’s a city. Reading? A very large Town. St David’s in Wales? A city m’lord, nearing 2000 residents!
in Ireland a town becomes a city when it has both a Catholic cathedral and a Protestant cathedral, hence the city of Armagh with a population of ~16,000 (and two cathedrals) is a city while the town of Drogheda with a population of +44,000 (and one cathedral) is not
There’s no technical threshold where a town becomes a city in the UK, it is literally just when they get approved by the monarch/government as to be allowed to call themselves a city. Periodically they approve new towns to become cities, and large towns can send in applications to be approved. The only difference is in the name and prestige though, it doesn’t confer any legal status.
The smallest city (St Davids: 1,751) is tiny compared to the largest town (Reading: 355,596), as it was granted city status centuries ago, but has barely grown since.
You can also lose city status, Rochester used to be a city, but lost the status when they forgot to send in the application to retain it during regional boundary changes in the 1990s.
City or town, same shit.. We do have villages though, they are 200-1.000 inhabitants and outside city limits.
In Portugal there are three levels to a settlement:
The lower level are villages (aldeias) and localities (localidades).
For a place to be upgraded from the lower level to a town (vila) it needs to be the main settlement of a civil parish (or multiple civil parishes), have at least 3000 voters in an urban continuum, have regular cultural and civic activities, have relevant local economic activity across all sectors and have at least two thirds of the following infrastructure:
National or local public administrative services, health center, pharmacy, cultural or recreational associations, elderly care services, infrastructure for collective sports, restaurants, banks, basic or secondary schools, post office, public parks or gardens, cultural sites classified as being of public interest.
For a place to be upgraded from town to city (cidade), it needs at least 9000 voters in an urban continuum, have all the things on the town list, and have at least two thirds of the following infrastructure:
Health services with permanent emergency service, firefighter corps, cultural or artistic infrastructure (museum, library and theatre or equivalent), sports stadium or multisports park, touristic businesses, university or polytechnic, public transport network, industrial or commercial park, techpark or reserch institutes, protected natural areas.
A place that doesn’t fit these criteria can still be considered a town or city for historical reasons or for reasons of importance to the local area. Places that are capitals of a municipality are automatically towns, even if they don’t have the necessary criteria.
In Denmark everything above 200 inhabitant is a ‘By’.
Landsby (country side settlement)=Village.
Provinsby (Province settlement) = Midsize town
Storby (Large settlement) = Large town.
The smallest division is a municipal, there is not a special benefits of being a city. However between 1970 and 2006 the area defining Copenhagen was both a municipal, and a county at the same time.
Normally there were many municipals in a country.
Never. There are no official definitions for “city”, “town”, “village”, etc.
When an area reaches a population of 200, it becomes a *tätort* (lit. “dense locality”).
If this *tätort* houses a municipal seat, it becomes a *centralort* (lit. “central locality”). A municipality is the smallest administrative unit – every area must be part of one – and are usually around 30 to 80 km in width.
However, until 1995, Statistics Sweden defined any locality with a population larger than 10,000 as a *stad* (“city”).
Well…
Town = by
City = by
There’s no set population limit for a “by”, but it depends more on the administrative functions. A “by” is usually the administrative center of an area and has a town/city center, while villages (“bygder”/”tettsteder”) are often more spread out houses/farms without an administrative center (there are exceptions though). Basically, the population size doesn’t really matter when it comes to what we call “bystatus” (when a “tettsted” gets officially recognized as a “by”)
The smallest official “by” in Norway is Kolvereid with around 1700 people, but there are plenty of bigger “tettsteder” that do not have “bystatus”.
A lot of places have the title of city for historical reasons, even if very few people live there today. The tiniest city is Mesen, with just about 1000 inhabitants.
In Germany, a town becomes a city when it is granted city rights by it’s state.
However, every state can set up its own rules for that. For example in my state new cities need to have 10.000 inhabitants, but smaller already existing cities do not lose their title (our smallest city has 251 inhabitants) and larger villages do not automatically become a city (the largest village in my state has 28.000 inhabitants).
But since being a city or not doesn’t really make a difference nowadays, we also differentiate functionally into Unterzentrum, Mittelzentrum and Obezentrum which are defined by the facilities they provide to the public (like secondary schools, libraries, specialised hospitals and so on).
In the UK, city status is awarded by the Government, it’s a myth about there being a Cathedral. I assume there is a ceremoney and the new city gets a fancy scroll.
Bosnia and Herzegovina – same as Serbia in another comment. There are municipalities and cities, towns are not officially a thing, although the seats of municipalities are often “town-sized” if they are not cities.
A municipality becomes a city by law. A city can also have multiple municipalities, but this is currently only the case for the capital I believe.
Cities are usually at least regionally important.
Before the 90s, there were only 5 official cities afaik – Sarajevo, Mostar, Zenica, Tuzla and Banja Luka.
Now there are many more, even though we have a smaller population.
Linguistically, there is no difference between *town* and *city* in German (*Stadt*), neither in French (*ville*) nor Italian (*città*) nor Romansh (*cità, marcau* depending on the variety).
A smaller settlement is a *Dorf, village, villaggio, cumün/vischnanca/vitg*.
Legally, there are only municipalities (*Gemeinde, commune, cumün/vischnanca*) today.
Statistically, a municipality with 10 000 inhabitants is a *Stadt*.
There are words for fortified settlements in French and Italian, *cité* and *borgo*, but these depend on the way the settlement is built. In Swiss German *Stedtli* “little city” is used.
For historical Cities, a royal charter is needed that grants the rights to hold a market, to have a court of justice with the right to issue capital punishment, and to have a city wall.
So nowadays, there are statistical “Städte” that are just big villages, or even groups of multiple smaller settlements, and statistical “Dörfer” (or rather, just not cities, but normal municipalities), that have a fortified settlement in their core.
The most neutral word for a settlement in German is *Ort* or *Ortschaft*. You can use that when you don’t want to commit to making a statement about its status as historical or statistical city or seat of municipial authorities.
The only requirement is to be granted official city status. There isn’t a requirement of any buildings to be there or to be a certain population. Just the status is what decides if a settlement is called a city, and for most of them this status is hundreds of years old.
Therefore the largest city is Rīga with almost 600 thousand inhabitants, and smallest is Durbe with 480 inhabitants. There are 9 cities in Latvia with under 1k population.
The monarch just decides it. Historically it was more to do with logical things like size but nowadays it’s either just because the monarch likes it or more likely is just politics. Eg; local government and the MP making a fuss about it and looking like they’ve achieved something when they win city status. Usually it only comes when a monarch is celebrating a Jubilee and between them and the government they’ll decide on which ones get city status.
Example, St Davids is a city and it has just 1,100 people in it. Reading has 174,000 but it’s just a town. There’s actually 9 cities that have less than 25,000 people. One of them is the City of London which is a square mile area inside London. London itself *technically* isn’t a city by the British definition, meaning Birmingham is *technically* the biggest city.
I’m all for a constitutional monarchy and quirky historical traditions but the city status process is stupid. It should just be place with more than 100,000 people.