How do you decide what is and what isn't part of your city?

For HK it's quite easy because we've only got to worry about a border on one side really - and it's well defined.

For most cities though it can get complicated with relation to metro and suburban populations.

HK's population is usually just listed as one number - anyone living within the border which is 6.9 ~ 7million.

For Detroit the best description of the "core" would be adding Oakland, Macomb, and Wayne counties together. Combined, they have a population of 4.1 million in an area of 1,967 sq. mi. Though the surrounding counties do have a commuter connection, I wouldn't call them suburbs, but rather satellite cities. (Lapeer, Monroe, Port Huron, Ann Arbor, and Flint.)

Its a hard one to define.

The city ends when the countryside starts.For some cities its only 10km away from the city center.For others you have to pass thourgh other urban areas before you are truely out there.

Michael Jackson reached the city limits of Los Angeles in his 'Speed Demon' video clip as an animated dog character.Amazing when you think about it.Since watching this video clip I have come to the conclusion that a city ends when you reach an area without urban dwellings.

Depends often on who is asking. If a person who lives in Brooklyn is asked where he/she lives, they would answer Brooklyn Heights or some other local section of Bklyn is the person asking is from NYC. If the Bklyn person was in London and was asked by a Londoner, they would probably answer NYC and maybe follow with Bklyn. We all live in sections of big metro areas and respond to where we live on the basis of the person asking the question. Are the New York Giants a New York team? You bet. Where do they play?

TOM123 said:

thats simple, if ya like it ,say it is in........;if ya dont, 'thats not part of the city'.

riddle solved...... no more postings plzzz

mods plz lock this one, this aint gonna take us anywhere.

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Who are you to say what is and isn't going anywhere?

I know some of you came up with population figures earlier on, I know this doesn't mean you don't understand what I was asking, but this isn't really what I had in mind.

I was thinking of a city more in terms of civic pride and all that, many cities have a strong identity attached to them, and in pre-industrial times this identity quite clearly went along with the obvious geographic limits of the city... there was no need to draw boundaries around medieval Chester for example, because it was very obvious what Chester was, it was a patch of urbanism like a blotch of ink on a clean piece of paper, but now that paper is less clean, there are blotches everywhere, all containing a variety of cities and towns with their own unique identities, and especially with big cities, you may leave the city and enter suburbia and suddenly realise at some point that you are no longer really in the city... the people have no cultural ties to the city, the ties they do have are economic ones that can be calculated as metro areas are, but aren't really visible, you could be anywhere. Even then the city may not be the centre of the suburbia, it could be blending in with a kind of common suburbia around more than one city or town. There may be boundaries of various types drawn here and there, but these often contradict eachother, you maybe are within the Leeds Postcode but Bradford City Council Area and so on.

So what I'm concerned with isn't what is the most reliable way of saying where a city exists, or any objective, calculated way of using city boundaries, but where do you prefer to consider the city's boundaries to be?... or even do you like to think of cities as discrete entities that you are either within or without at all?

And I think that this is fairly important because in all the drawing and redrawing of political boundaries and calculation of the economic effects in metro areas a more fundamental meaning of what a city is seems to be lost, what is a city's identity, who will rally around that identy and how has that meaning of city changed in the popular mindset since the simple 'inkblot' times... is the meaning even still valid.

So I would appreciate your thoughts on this.

Also I'd like to mention that the New York/Brooklyn thing sounds similar (but not the same) as the situation in London, there are places 'within' London (the urbanised area anyway) that the residents of which like to say as seperate places... people may say for example that they are from Staines (Ali G certainly does) and not consider this part of London at all, notwithstanding the fact that Londoners often can't comprehend that there is a world outside London therefore saying they are from 'London' is like saying I am from 'Earth' jk ) Different from New York though, cos ones you get into the metropolitan heart of the city it pretty much is 'all London'.

I think the definition of a city is something progressive, not absolute. Firstly, there's the core of the city which is the densest part of it : In the US usually CBD's, in Europe usually Historical center. Afterwards, there's the urban area, and then the metropolitan area. According to cities and countries, their could be even more different scales. Then, you add to this the administrative borders. In some countries those are larger than the urban area (Germany, Italy, Spain), in other those are strictly about the city very core (Australia, France, many US cities).

All this to say that limits of cities are very arbitrary. They depend on local History, culture, local vision of "what is a city". My personal opinion is that in most of cases the urban area is the better definition... it's the most visible aspect of the delimitations of a ciy. However, there are so many exceptions to this that it can't be a standard rule.

Calgary is anything within the city-limits. All of our suburbs are within these limits (about as large as New York City), so there is no confusion there. Inside and outside these limits, there are several kilometers of empty land between Calgary and any small cities surrounding it.

There is also continuous development from the core out to the last suburb, and Calgary has one of the most centralized workforces in North America, so our LRT network is busy all day ferrying people from the suburbs to and through downtown.

You could live out in a suburb 20-30Km's from the core (like me... ) but you would still be, without question, a Calgarian. As soon as you move outside the city limits, you are no longer considered Calgarian.

I'm accustomed to go by administrative borders and minimum population.
A place which is administered by a mayor or city council (or anything similar) and has at least 10.000 inhabitants is a town, with more than 100.000 inhabitants I call it a "city" (in sense of big town). Most people here who live just outside of the administrative borders of Hamburg, say "I live in name of village/town near Hamburg."

TOM123 said:

thats simple, if ya like it ,say it is in........;if ya dont, 'thats not part of the city'.

riddle solved...... no more postings plzzz

mods plz lock this one, this aint gonna take us anywhere.

Click to expand...

you, my friend, are a jack ass

DiggerD21 said:

I'm accustomed to go by administrative borders and minimum population.
A place which is administered by a mayor or city council (or anything similar) and has at least 10.000 inhabitants is a town, with more than 100.000 inhabitants I call it a "city" (in sense of big town). Most people here who live just outside of the administrative borders of Hamburg, say "I live in name of village/town near Hamburg."

Click to expand...

This can work in Germany, but not in France. French municipalities haven't changed their borders since 1790, which means before the agricultural and industrial revolutions. That's why we have 36,000 municipalities when the 24 other EU countries have 45,000 municipalities all together.

Hamburg makes 755 km² with 1.7 million people. That makes a density of 2,302/km².

On the other side, Paris is only 87 km², nearly 10 times smaller. Both municipalities can't simply be compared. Now if we take an area the size of Hamburg (755 km²), we find 6.7 million people in Paris. That makes a density of 8,804/km². However, that area is spead on the territory of 126 municipalities. They are denser than Hamburg, more urbanized than Hamburg, but you still get 126 municipalities where there's only one in Hamburg.

The statistical urban area of Paris spreads on more than 400 municipalities, counting 10,136,000 people on 2,723 km². Even here, the density is of 3,722/km², which means superior to the one of Hamburg. To sum this up, your theory works well in Germany, but can't be applied internationally.

Generally metropolian areas rather than city lines provide better comparisons of US cities. However, when comparing cities in different countries with different national classification systems for city and metropolitan boundaries, urbanized areas, while imperfect, provide a better form of measuring square mileage, population, etc. Urbanized area definitions allow a more uniform classification system for cities like Jacksonville, Florida, which claims to the 13th largest city in the US by virtue of having sprawled its city boundaries out to over a thousand square miles. Or Chongquing, China, which claims to be the most populous city in China by virtue of having city boundaries that are equal to that of a typical Chinese province. Using urbanized areas also provides a standarized way of addressing the differences between US & Canadian metropolitan definations which comes up as a frequent topic on this site.

It is a vague thing that has something to do with the feel. Indeed, is there metro's, trams going? Is there any green space left between? Do the residents regularly go to the 'central city'? Amsterdam community has 750.000 inhabitants, with everything attached to it (with almost no green space in between) about 1.000.000,still I think not as Zaandam as being a part of Amsterdam.
If you count up all the 'new towns' you'd probably come to 1.500.000 but no way Pumerend or Almere is Amsterdam eventhough many many people living there work and go out in A'dam (like many colleagues of me for example).
Weet ik veel...