What is a City?

[The Hallucinating Goose]

1 hour ago, SouthBedfordshireFan said:

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. 

 

These problems certainly do make defining cities complicated, especially in very built up countries such as England.

Using myself as an example, due to the metropolitan nature of the area I live in, I always tell people I am from Hull because I know they will be familiar with the city whereas I am actually from a small town in East Yorkshire. The town I am from though is close enough to the city that many people that live here work in Hull and do their shopping there and thus are very much connected to it using its amenities. 

I do not actually work in Hull, I work in a different East Yorkshire town to the one I live in but to get to it I have to travel into Hull and out of the city again as the town I work in is completely connected to Hull and so is basically just a suburb of the city, and I do know that people from the town in question generally consider themselves living in the city.

The only reason they don't live in the city is where the council boundary is with the city itself having a separate council to the East Riding. Historically Hull was in the East Riding, and still is if the ceremonial county is taken into account of course, but having a separate council these days means that large areas of the developed urban area aren't in the city, despite as I said, the people themselves considering themselves to be. 

So to sum my post up, I live in the larger metropolitan area and tell people I am from Hull. People who live in the wider urban area say they are from Hull but none of us actually are from the city because of modern council boundaries. 

So how are we defining a city? 

[Farmduck]

13 hours ago, SouthBedfordshireFan said:

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. 

 

In short, there is no answer if you keep adding irrelevant metrics. Partly this is because of the English language where a word may have a very specific meaning but may also have general meanings at the same time. Formally, a city is a population centre that has been designated a city by the relevant Government authority. Informally and historically, a city is a large urban area that is larger than a town or village. Unfortunately in the second case, town and village can also have the same formal or informal usage so we can end up trying to define A by using terms B and C which also are undefined.

Your problem is that you are swapping back and forth between the two types of usage. You accept that the formal definition exists but then you think that an example of the informal usage undermines the formal status of city.

The only useful black-and-white answer is to ignore the area and the people and use a purely legal definition of the local council's powers. A city is a corporate body with specific legal powers which are only held by cities. Somebody mentioned Chongqing well this model is the basis of the Chinese system of cities. It is also the basis of the Australian model. If you strip away all the history of England you will probably find that today's English cities are only cities because a central authority said they were and gave them city-specific powers.

The fact that a city contains rural land is irrelevant because a city has the legal authority to control land use and zoning. I live in a street that is currently zoned residential but that only happened about 10 years ago. For the previous 14 years I lived in the same place and it was zoned agricultural like most of the land around here. I lived in the City of Blacktown the whole time. This combination of urban/rural has no bearing on the formal definition of a city. Here in Greater Sydney, most cities - there are about 17 cities and 10 municipalities plus 2 Shires in Greater Sydney - are the product of conurbation, where separate farms swelled to villages, then to towns and eventually formed a continuous urban area. This is a fairly standard global model and means that there will always be rural areas with larger city boundaries.

You mention a village within a London borough but so what? From my cursory glance at Wikipedia this seems more like the product of Government decision to maintain low-density areas with open space, rather than any definitive undermining of the definition of a city. My area has designated, no-development areas right through it. They're called flood plains and most can be used for agricultural purposes but they don't stop Blacktown being a city. We often find historically significant places maintained in a relatively undeveloped state, even when they fall within urban areas.

A city is a city because the Govt body with the legal authority to designate an area as a city has designated that area as a city.

 

Edited April 17 by Farmduck

[gingerjon]

7 hours ago, Farmduck said:

If you strip away all the history of England you will probably find that today's English cities are only cities because a central authority said they were and gave them city-specific powers.

Literally what a Royal Charter is (was).

[gingerjon]

Oh, and Maulden Rushett isn't a village in a city. It's a village in a borough (the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames) in a county (Greater London).#

The city in the City of London is the square mile overseen by what was once known as the Corporation of the City of London. It is not itself a London borough.

The only other city in the county of Greater London is Westminster.

Southwark has a cathedral but not city status. 

[Vambo]

Growing up I was always told that in order to be a city you needed to have a cathedral. Fortunately Blackburn never did get that status lol

[17 stone giant]

A city is where you have more than 10000 residents. Well it was on Sim City on the Super Nintendo.

[The Hallucinating Goose]

7 hours ago, 17 stone giant said:

A city is where you have more than 10000 residents. Well it was on Sim City on the Super Nintendo.

Sim City 4 = the greatest computer game of all time. No question. 

[RBKnight]

On 16/04/2024 at 20:21, The Hallucinating Goose said:

These problems certainly do make defining cities complicated, especially in very built up countries such as England.

Using myself as an example, due to the metropolitan nature of the area I live in, I always tell people I am from Hull because I know they will be familiar with the city whereas I am actually from a small town in East Yorkshire. The town I am from though is close enough to the city that many people that live here work in Hull and do their shopping there and thus are very much connected to it using its amenities. 

I do not actually work in Hull, I work in a different East Yorkshire town to the one I live in but to get to it I have to travel into Hull and out of the city again as the town I work in is completely connected to Hull and so is basically just a suburb of the city, and I do know that people from the town in question generally consider themselves living in the city.

The only reason they don't live in the city is where the council boundary is with the city itself having a separate council to the East Riding. Historically Hull was in the East Riding, and still is if the ceremonial county is taken into account of course, but having a separate council these days means that large areas of the developed urban area aren't in the city, despite as I said, the people themselves considering themselves to be. 

So to sum my post up, I live in the larger metropolitan area and tell people I am from Hull. People who live in the wider urban area say they are from Hull but none of us actually are from the city because of modern council boundaries. 

So how are we defining a city? 

But your "town" is the seat of a bishop, is it not ?  (albeit a suffragan bishop, who runs a church in York....)

[The Hallucinating Goose]

4 minutes ago, RBKnight said:

But your "town" is the seat of a bishop, is it not ?  (albeit a suffragan bishop, who runs a church in York....)

Sorry, I don't understand what you mean? 

[RBKnight]

2 minutes ago, The Hallucinating Goose said:

Sorry, I don't understand what you mean? 

Apologies, I was being playful over people getting pedantic over the definition of a "city" (and I thought you lived in Beverley)

[The Hallucinating Goose]

2 hours ago, RBKnight said:

Apologies, I was being playful over people getting pedantic over the definition of a "city" (and I thought you lived in Beverley)

Yeah, I was just being dumb. It was too early in the morning. I do live in Beverley and you're quite right, we do have a suffragan bishop. Yeah, I wasn't thinking when I read your post!