What is a City?

As a person interested in geography I notice that the lack of uniformity in the definition of a city results in weird and illogical comparisons and just an interesting conversation to have I think. After a brief conversation regarding this in another thread I thought to create a whole new dedicated to it here. 

Thank you.

It's a place with a Royal Charter.

10 minutes ago, Griff said:

It's a place with a Royal Charter.

 

What about sovereign states that do not have a monarchy? 

How to account for those and to compare cities from these locations on various metrics such size, safety, crime, economic output, population density, and so on? 

So for example the top 10 largest cities in the world? 

How would that list be formulated if cities are only with Royal charters?

56 minutes ago, SouthBedfordshireFan said:

What about sovereign states that do not have a monarchy? 

How to account for those and to compare cities from these locations on various metrics such size, safety, crime, economic output, population density, and so on? 

So for example the top 10 largest cities in the world? 

How would that list be formulated if cities are only with Royal charters?

 

 

They're not real cities. In the US, you can just declare yourself a city. 

38 minutes ago, Griff said:

They're not real cities. In the US, you can just declare yourself a city. 

In the US they do have to be incorporated to be considered such so could that not be an non-monarchy equivalent to a royal charter?

What about places like China, India and elsewhere?

1 hour ago, SouthBedfordshireFan said:

What about sovereign states that do not have a monarchy? 

How to account for those and to compare cities from these locations on various metrics such size, safety, crime, economic output, population density, and so on? 

So for example the top 10 largest cities in the world? 

How would that list be formulated if cities are only with Royal charters?

 

 

Before we can discuss the top 10 cities in the world we need to decide what in fact defines those cities, is it the city proper, the urban area or the larger metropolitan area?

The city proper is the area that is described in a city's charter and/or governed by the City Council. 

The urban area is the built up, continuously developed area. 

The metropolitan area is the entire area that is served by the amenities of an urban area. 

A good city to use to break this down is London. The City of London itself is the tiny 1 mile square area in the middle of Greater London. The urban area is in fact Greater London and the metropolitan area, it can be argued includes large swathes of the surrounding counties because the city serves these counties by providing a lot of jobs to their citizens and thus have people travelling into the urban area on a daily basis. 

All three of these definitions are used to talk about "cities" and depending on which one you use your list of 10 largest cities will be very different. Taking London again, if you use the city proper definition then London's population is approximately 10,000. If you use the metropolitan definition then you're talking more like 20,000,000. 

I should just point out that human demography is my favourite subject in the world so I hope you're up for a very in depth discussion on this topic!

19 minutes ago, SouthBedfordshireFan said:

In the US they do have to be incorporated to be considered such so could that not be an non-monarchy equivalent to a royal charter?

What about places like China, India and elsewhere?

No. If you don't have a monarch to give you a Royal Charter, you can't have cities.

12 minutes ago, The Hallucinating Goose said:

I should just point out that human demography is my favourite subject in the world so I hope you're up for a very in depth discussion on this topic!

Same here. 

1 hour ago, SouthBedfordshireFan said:

In the US they do have to be incorporated to be considered such so could that not be an non-monarchy equivalent to a royal charter?

What about places like China, India and elsewhere?

I believe China and India both use population to dictate what are cities. They both used tiered ranking systems based on population to determine exactly which status each city is given and I think the purpose of this is to calculate taxes and other financial factors. 

I know in China their top tier status is Prefecture which is the equivalent of what we would call a metropolis, which itself could contain a number of cities of a lower tier. This is something you see in our metropolises as well, for example the West Midlands metro area which includes Birmingham, Coventry, Wolverhampton (as well as many towns) or the West Yorkshire metro area which includes Leeds, Bradford and Wakefield (again, as well as a load of towns). 

It is up to individual countries to dictate what constitutes a city in their country. There is no one correct definition of a city internationally. 

1 hour ago, The Hallucinating Goose said:

Before we can discuss the top 10 cities in the world we need to decide what in fact defines those cities, is it the city proper, the urban area or the larger metropolitan area?

The city proper is the area that is described in a city's charter and/or governed by the City Council. 

The urban area is the built up, continuously developed area. 

The metropolitan area is the entire area that is served by the amenities of an urban area. 

A good city to use to break this down is London. The City of London itself is the tiny 1 mile square area in the middle of Greater London. The urban area is in fact Greater London and the metropolitan area, it can be argued includes large swathes of the surrounding counties because the city serves these counties by providing a lot of jobs to their citizens and thus have people travelling into the urban area on a daily basis. 

All three of these definitions are used to talk about "cities" and depending on which one you use your list of 10 largest cities will be very different. Taking London again, if you use the city proper definition then London's population is approximately 10,000. If you use the metropolitan definition then you're talking more like 

Remind me to respond to this please. I need to formulate my thoughts pertaining to this before I get into it.

1 hour ago, Griff said:

No. If you don't have a monarch to give you a Royal Charter, you can't have cities.

So therefore cities can only exist in monarchies like Saudi Arabia or Bhutan among others?

Interesting perspective.

1 minute ago, SouthBedfordshireFan said:

So therefore cities can only exist in monarchies like Saudi Arabia or Bhutan among others?

Interesting perspective.

Now we are really falling deeper into the rabbit hole.

So if only monarchs could create cities then what constitutes a monarch? The French president is actually a monarch because he is the monarch of Andorra, but also the head of state of France of course so even though not the monarch of France he is a monarch and thus can still create cities. Did that make sense?? 

What about the Pope? The Pope is technically a monarch and the head of all Catholic peoples so does that mean that he can create cities anywhere where there are large Catholic populations? Of course the Pope is God's representative on Earth so does that mean that the Pope could elevate any town to city status if God wills it? 

But then again, who are we to say what a monarch is? There have been many ways to define a monarch through the course of history from absolute hereditary monarchies to democratically elected monarchies so isn't a modern day head of state really just a monarch with a different title? 

2 minutes ago, The Hallucinating Goose said:

Now we are really falling deeper into the rabbit hole.

So if only monarchs could create cities then what constitutes a monarch? The French president is actually a monarch because he is the monarch of Andorra, but also the head of state of France of course so even though not the monarch of France he is a monarch and thus can still create cities. Did that make sense?? 

What about the Pope? The Pope is technically a monarch and the head of all Catholic peoples so does that mean that he can create cities anywhere where there are large Catholic populations? Of course the Pope is God's representative on Earth so does that mean that the Pope could elevate any town to city status if God wills it? 

But then again, who are we to say what a monarch is? There have been many ways to define a monarch through the course of history from absolute hereditary monarchies to democratically elected monarchies so isn't a modern day head of state really just a monarch with a different title? 

To add to your rabbit hole. I am a Muslim so I do not think or believe that the Pope is God's representative on Earth anyways so it leaves a potentiality that those 'cities' may not even be cities to some people at least 

8 hours ago, The Hallucinating Goose said:

Now we are really falling deeper into the rabbit hole.

So if only monarchs could create cities then what constitutes a monarch? The French president is actually a monarch because he is the monarch of Andorra, but also the head of state of France of course so even though not the monarch of France he is a monarch and thus can still create cities. Did that make sense?? 

What about the Pope? The Pope is technically a monarch and the head of all Catholic peoples so does that mean that he can create cities anywhere where there are large Catholic populations? Of course the Pope is God's representative on Earth so does that mean that the Pope could elevate any town to city status if God wills it? 

But then again, who are we to say what a monarch is? There have been many ways to define a monarch through the course of history from absolute hereditary monarchies to democratically elected monarchies so isn't a modern day head of state really just a monarch with a different title? 

No.

9 hours ago, SouthBedfordshireFan said:

To add to your rabbit hole. I am a Muslim so I do not think or believe that the Pope is God's representative on Earth anyways so it leaves a potentiality that those 'cities' may not even be cities to some people at least 

Very good point, so is it the case that for a city to be a city, everyone in its community has to accept that fact? 

1 hour ago, Griff said:

No.

Why not? 

In Australia, it all comes down to finances. A city is a population centre which is capable of being financially self-sustaining while providing the full range of modern municipal services. A city can raise its own money by borrowing. A shire can only get money (in NSW) from the Dept of Local Govt. In between these we have municipality, suburb, county, town and locality. Most of these are just geographical distinctions such as county which exists only at the Land Titles Office.

Population is generally irrelevant. For example, the City of Brisbane has 1.2 million people while City of Sydney only has 225K.

12 hours ago, SouthBedfordshireFan said:

To add to your rabbit hole. I am a Muslim so I do not think or believe that the Pope is God's representative on Earth anyways so it leaves a potentiality that those 'cities' may not even be cities to some people at least 

I'm not a Muslim but I don't believe that either.

2 hours ago, The Hallucinating Goose said:

Why not? 

There's no need to redefine "monarch".

Changing the meaning of words to fit your hypothesis is poor stuff.

36 minutes ago, Griff said:

There's no need to redefine "monarch".

Changing the meaning of words to fit your hypothesis is poor stuff.

You've completely missed the point I was making. I was suggesting that if we are to redefine what a city is when so many countries have different ways to categorise cities, ie, saying that a city is only a proper city if a monarch gives it that status, then countries that do not have the traditional definition of a monarch but have cities must have a different form of monarch in charge. I don't actually believe this you understand, I was merely putting it out there as a point of discussion, you know, how these kinds of speculative discussions work.

3 hours ago, The Hallucinating Goose said:

You've completely missed the point I was making. I was suggesting that if we are to redefine what a city is when so many countries have different ways to categorise cities, ie, saying that a city is only a proper city if a monarch gives it that status, then countries that do not have the traditional definition of a monarch but have cities must have a different form of monarch in charge. I don't actually believe this you understand, I was merely putting it out there as a point of discussion, you know, how these kinds of speculative discussions work.

No, I didn't miss your point. You missed mine. Other countries are getting it wrong.

54 minutes ago, Griff said:

No, I didn't miss your point. You missed mine. Other countries are getting it wrong.

No they aren't, they do it the way their law dictates to do it. Please explain why you think other countries are wrong and we are right, that is such an ignorant viewpoint. 

45 minutes ago, The Hallucinating Goose said:

No they aren't, they do it the way their law dictates to do it. Please explain why you think other countries are wrong and we are right, that is such an ignorant viewpoint. 

Surely it's obvious.

20 hours ago, The Hallucinating Goose said:

Before we can discuss the top 10 cities in the world we need to decide what in fact defines those cities, is it the city proper, the urban area or the larger metropolitan area?

The city proper is the area that is described in a city's charter and/or governed by the City Council. 

The urban area is the built up, continuously developed area. 

The metropolitan area is the entire area that is served by the amenities of an urban area. 

A good city to use to break this down is London. The City of London itself is the tiny 1 mile square area in the middle of Greater London. The urban area is in fact Greater London and the metropolitan area, it can be argued includes large swathes of the surrounding counties because the city serves these counties by providing a lot of jobs to their citizens and thus have people travelling into the urban area on a daily basis. 

All three of these definitions are used to talk about "cities" and depending on which one you use your list of 10 largest cities will be very different. Taking London again, if you use the city proper definition then London's population is approximately 10,000. If you use the metropolitan definition then you're talking more like 20,000,000. 

Here is my issue. Good you use London as an example as London among other cities are my examples. 

If you define cities using government boundary areas you run into the problem of variances in government definitions of what a city is and there are no way accurate comparisons can be made as you are not really comparing like for like. For example Chongqing in China and many Chinese 'cities' contain huge swathes of rural land whereas the people of the generally consider a city to be primarily an urban area. 

The problem with using continuously built up urban area is that you end up potentially grouping towns and other settlements that have grown into each other as one singular entity for example there are hardly any rural land separating the settlements of Wolverhampton, Birmingham, West Brom, Walsall, Smethwick, Dudley and others yet in this metric you will end up bundling them all together as Birmingham or broadly group as West Midlands 

Metropolitan area again does a similar thing it groups together multiple settlements in one go rather than a single one. 

The thing with London is that the government boundaries for it changed over the centuries and has the potentiality to change without any urbanisation actually taking place.  

Greater London contains rural land. In the London Borough of Kingston upon Thames you have the village of Maulden Rushett. How can a city contain a village?

It also contains a number of towns that were large and distinct in their own right and there was and still are swathes of rural land that separated those towns from the urbanised core of London a notable example being Croydon which was governed as county borough prior to its inclusion to Greater London. That name of itself says so much. It just a name that in my opinion neatly fits in with the metropolitan area of London. 

Even the County of London which preceded Greater London when created in 1889 to incorporate the urbanised areas that grew as London outgrew the initial cores of Westminster and the City of London failed to account for the urbanised areas of Essex in East Ham and West Ham and Tottenham in Middlesex.

So in essence London is a key example of the pitfalls of using each of these metrics.