We cannot gauge a city based on the number of tall buildings or the level of grit in a depressed section of the city. These are images that come to us through pop culture and other media. Others immediately think of inner-city scenes of dark alleys and gang violence. For some, towering skyscrapers across a grand cityscape constitutes a city. Media Portrayals of Cities Differ from Experience– There are many people who would claim they do not live in a city because it does not match their media-informed image of the city. It does seem that “urban” can’t be defined based on numbers. This lack of a standard in defining “urban” has contributed to the meaninglessness of the term in the minds of many. Even combining population density with population is inadequate because density varies dramatically in different parts of the world. settlements in Norway of 200 people or more) while Bénin or Malaysia only uses “urban” for places of 10,000 people or more (Davey 2002, 16). Less densely populated nations consider small settlements “urban” (ex.
In densely populated areas, like the Indonesian island of Java, nearly everything becomes a continuous city. As soon as we begin to set parameters on such a definition, we can see the problems. Some statisticians set the size of a city as greater than 50,000 people (Clark 2014, 33). Statistics Don’t Tell the Whole Story– The simplest way to define a city is to base it on population size. Since these words are so elastic in their use, we cannot rely on the word “city” to communicate the essence of a city. Ancient texts that refer to cities often refer to small settlements that would barely pass for a small town today. In many languages, the word that has come to mean city was used to refer to another structure (for example, a fortress or port). Many other languages only have two terms (for example, French ville and village, German Stadt and Dorf, Italian citta and villaggio, Spanish ciudad and pueblo) (O’Connor 2008, 2008).
English typically has three tiers of terms to describe human settlements: city, town, and village. Imprecise Language– In most languages, the word used for a city can describe a wide range of settlements. Los Angeles, undeniably a city, challenged traditional understandings of a city as dense and vertical.
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