Town

• 1. Introduction

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  A town sits in an awkward middle, generally larger than a village but smaller than a city. That single sentence hides a surprising amount of disagreement. Around 7100 BC, a settlement called Catalhoyuk already clustered people together in what some call the oldest inhabited town. Thousands of years later, the city of Rattenberg in Austria carries the title of city with roughly 400 inhabitants, while Oakville in Canada, with a 2021 population of 213,759, still calls itself a town. How can one word stretch from a few hundred people to over two hundred thousand? Why does a place's population so often fail to settle the question? And what does it mean that, starting in March 2021, the then-193 member states of the United Nations were still trying to agree on what a town even is?

• 2. A Fence In The Beginning

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  The word town once meant a fence. It shares an origin with the German word for fence, the Dutch word for garden, yard, or enclosure, and the Old Norse word for an enclosure such as one made for a homestead. In both Germanic and Celtic, the original sense was a fortress or an enclosure. Cognates in many modern Germanic languages still mean fence or hedge.

  In England, the meaning slid from the fence itself to the space the fence enclosed. A town there was a small community that could not afford, or was not allowed, to build walls, so it built a palisade or stockade instead. In the Netherlands, the enclosed space was a garden, especially those of the wealthy, ringed by a high fence or wall. The garden of the palace of Het Loo in Apeldoorn served as the model for the privy garden of William III and Mary II at Hampton Court.

  In Old Norse, tun meant a grassy place between farmhouses, and modern Norwegian still uses the word with a similar sense. The Old English form became a common place-name suffix across England and southeastern Scotland during the Anglo-Saxon settlement period. Alongside it ran other suffixes: ham for home, stede for stead, and burh for bury, borough, or burgh. Toponymists even have a word for the names of towns and cities themselves, the astyonym, built from the Ancient Greek for town and for name.

• 3. The Definition Problem

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  Population size is not a reliable determinant of urban character. In India, at least until recent times, a large village might hold several times as many people as a small town. In the United Kingdom, historical cities are far smaller than the larger towns. The clearer dividing line tends to be economic. Most of a town's people earn their living from manufacturing, commerce, and public services rather than from agriculture and other primary-sector work.

  Suburban growth, satellite development, and the drift of city dwellers into villages have muddied even that line. These movements create communities that are urban in economy and culture yet missing other urban traits. Temporary mining locations sit at the far edge of the problem. They are plainly non-rural, yet have at best a questionable claim to be called a town.

  Governance offers another axis. Many towns exist as distinct units with legally defined borders and the trappings of local government, such as a police force. In the United States these are incorporated towns, while a town without its own governance is unincorporated. An unincorporated town may still be marked out by zoning districts, or, in some planned communities, by covenants written into the properties themselves. The United States census names many census-designated places after unincorporated towns, though those areas usually sweep in rural and suburban land and even surrounding villages.

• 4. The Five Ages Of A Town

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  Australian geographer Thomas Griffith Taylor sorted towns not by size but by age and land use. He laid out five types in a sequence of growth. An infantile town has no clear zoning at all. A juvenile town has developed an area of shops. An adolescent town is one where factories have started to appear.

  The later stages add social and economic layering. An early mature town gains a separate area of high-class housing. A mature town arrives with defined industrial, commercial, and various types of residential area. Taylor's scheme treats a town as something that visibly ages, its zones hardening into place over time, a lens that reads a settlement's stage from how its land is used.

• 5. From Villa To Settlement

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  In Roman times a villa was a rural settlement, a main residence joined to a series of secondary buildings, and the center from which an agricultural holding was run. Some of these were the villa rustica, modest farmhouses out in the country. As large estates consolidated across the Roman Empire, the town became the center of these great farms.

  A split opened between the rustic and the urban. The country villa, or villa rustica, directed the working of resources, housed slave workers, kept livestock, and stored production. The urban villa, the pars urbana, sheltered the lord and took on the architectural and decorative forms of urban mansions. From the first century, great estates divided between the part the lord worked directly and the part handed to tenant settlers. Urban villas then became seats of administrative power, and by the fourth century the forms of vassalage typical of feudalism began to appear.

• 6. One Word, Many Laws

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  Across languages, the line between town and city often vanishes. Germans generally do not separate the two, using Stadt for both, reserving Dorf for a village. The International Statistics Conference of 1887 split Stadt by population: Landstadt under 5,000, Kleinstadt from 5,000 to 20,000, Mittelstadt between 20,000 and 100,000, and Grossstadt from 100,000 to 1,000,000. A city of one to five million might be called a Millionenstadt, and one above five million a Megastadt.

  In the United States the term shifts state by state. In Alabama, a municipality of 2,000 or more is a city and anything below is a town. In Indiana, a town cannot become a city until it reaches 2,000 people. In Pennsylvania, only one place, Bloomsburg, is officially designated a town under state law. In Nevada, a town has a government yet is not incorporated, and Paradise, home of the Las Vegas Strip, counted 186,020 residents in the 2000 census while remaining a town.

  The New England states run on a different logic entirely. There a town is the most prevalent minor civil division, often more important than the county. Its defining feature is a town meeting and a board of selectmen, while cities run on a mayor and a city council. Brookline, Massachusetts is a town despite being fairly urban, purely because of how it governs itself.

  Elsewhere the title is honorary or ceremonial. In Bulgaria, since 2005, a village seeking town status has needed social and technical infrastructure and at least 3,500 people, with resort settlements allowed as few as 1,000. In Hungary, before the fall of communism in 1990, villages under 10,000 could not become towns, yet places as small as 2,500, including Visegrad, have since gained the rank. In Italy, Bassano del Grappa received the status of citta in 1760 by the dogal decree of Francesco Loredan and has carried the title ever since.

• 7. Cathedrals And Bureaucratic Blunders

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  In England and Wales the title of city was long tied to a cathedral, and that quiet rule has produced some odd outcomes. The status of city is reserved for places holding letters patent, historically linked to possessing a cathedral. Yet that pre-qualification, resting on a cathedral of the established Church of England, ceased to apply from 1888.

  The gaps show in real places. Chelmsford stayed a town until the 5th of June 2012, despite being the seat of a diocese created in 1914. St Asaph became a city on the 1st of June 2012, even though its diocese was founded in the mid-sixth century. Some cities are tiny, such as Ely or St David's, while large boroughs like Northampton and Bournemouth are not cities at all.

  The strangest case runs the other way. Rochester in Kent had been a city for centuries. When the Medway district was created in 1998, a bureaucratic blunder meant Rochester lost its official city status, and it is now technically a town. The same word that once described a fence around a stockade had become a thing a place could lose by paperwork, which is part of why the Centre for Towns and figures like Lisa Nandy, in the 2020 Labour Party leadership election, pressed the case of smaller towns swinging away from their old loyalties.