City
Meaning

A city can be distinguished from other human settlements by its relatively great size, but also by its functions and its special symbolic status, which may be conferred by a central authority. The term can also refer either to the physical streets and buildings of the city or to the collection of people who dwell there and can be used in a general sense to mean urban rather than rural territory.

National censuses use a variety of definitions – invoking factors such as population, population density, number of dwellings, economic function, and infrastructure – to classify populations as urban. Typical working definitions for small-city populations start at around 100,000 people. Common population definitions for an urban area (city or town) range between 1,500 and 50,000 people, with most U.S. states using a minimum between 1,500 and 5,000 inhabitants. Some jurisdictions set no such minima. In the United Kingdom, city status is awarded by the Crown and then remains permanent. (Historically, the qualifying factor was the presence of a cathedral, resulting in some very small cities such as Wells, with a population of 12,000 as of 2018, and St Davids, with a population of 1,841 as of 2011.) According to the "functional definition", a city is not distinguished by size alone, but also by the role it plays within a larger political context. Cities serve as administrative, commercial, religious, and cultural hubs for their larger surrounding areas.

The presence of a literate elite is often associated with cities because of the cultural diversities present in a city. A typical city has professional administrators, regulations, and some form of taxation (food and other necessities or means to trade for them) to support the government workers. (This arrangement contrasts with the more typically horizontal relationships in a tribe or village accomplishing common goals through informal agreements between neighbors, or the leadership of a chief.) The governments may be based on heredity, religion, military power, work systems such as canal-building, food distribution, land-ownership, agriculture, commerce, manufacturing, finance, or a combination of these. Societies that live in cities are often called civilizations.

The degree of urbanization is a modern metric to help define what comprises a city: "a population of at least 50,000 inhabitants in contiguous dense grid cells (>1,500 inhabitants per square kilometer)". This metric was "devised over years by the European Commission, OECD, World Bank and others, and endorsed in March by the United Nations... largely for the purpose of international statistical comparison".
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