Short answers, pulled from the story.
The word town began as a simple fence with an ancient Proto-Germanic root describing a palisade or enclosure built to keep danger out and community in. This original meaning persists in place names across Europe where the suffix -ton or -toun marks the spot of an ancient enclosure.
In England and Wales the defining characteristic of a town for centuries was the right to hold a market or fair granted by royal charter. This legal document transformed a simple village into a town allowing merchants to trade goods and creating a central economic engine for the surrounding countryside.
In the Netherlands a place with only forty inhabitants can legally call itself a city if it was granted city rights centuries ago while a massive metropolis like The Hague remains a town in the eyes of the law. In Poland the distinction between a city and a town is often a matter of population size with cities requiring over one hundred thousand residents to be governed by a city president rather than a town mayor.
The town of Uppsala has a population of over two hundred thousand yet it is not classified as a major city because its urban area is spread over a vast land area unlike the dense urban core of Malmö. This illustrates how size no longer dictates status in the modern era where the line between town and city has become increasingly blurred.
In the Philippines every town is a municipality with a mayor and a vice mayor serving as the administrative center for a cluster of villages known as barangays. These towns function as hubs for commerce education and cultural activities connecting the rural hinterlands to the major urban centers.