I often have this problem when translating to English, too. In Croatia we only have "city" and "village" districts. To make things worse, the population sizes overlap greatly. The smallest "city" has a population of about 1500, and the largest "village" almost 15000.
@@MusikCassette Größte Gemeinde (municipality; not village) in Deutschland ohne Stadtrecht ist Seevetal in Niedersachsen, südlich an Hamburg angrenzend, mit ca. 42.000 Einwohnern. Kleinste Stadt in Deutschland ist Arnis (Stadtrecht seit 1934 durch die Nationalsozialisten; eine Kuriosität der Geschichte) in Schleswig-Holstein; eine Halbinsel in der Schlei. Sie hat ca. 270 Einwohner und liegt im Kreis Schleswig-Flensburg. Es gibt in Deutschland etwa 100 Städte (Stadtrecht) - von insgesamt ca. 2000 Städten - mit weniger als 2.500 Einwohnern.
When discussing the German language, it should also be pointed out that we don't really distinguish between "city" and "town". The German word "Stadt" can really refer to either. Btw, there used to be a cognade of "Stadt" in Old English: "stede". The word is obsolete these days, but can still be found in many placenames in England ending on "-sted" or "-stead".
How was stede used in Old English? Cause it also sounds like a cognate to "Stätte" to me. Was it used as a word for a type of builtup area like Stadt or could it also just have been used for basically any location like Stätte?
There are many places that would be a town, or even a city if you look at the map, but they would not be called a city in germany. Grossgemeinde, Gemeinde, etc. They simply are not big enough. You could call them a dorf or village, but that may not describe their regional importance. there are historical reasons to be a "Stadt" like Schweinfurt for example, which has been around for over 1200 years, and it is still a Stadt today, even by size requirement. And calling a city a Stadt by size of over 50,000 may be arbitrary, but it is a way to do it. then you have administrative functions that make a place a Stadt. While you may not make a distinction, there is a distinct difference. Kreisstadt, Freie Kreisstadt, Hauptstadt, Stadt, Ort, Gemeinde, Dorf, etc. viele gebraeuchliche Bezeichnungen.
The English word "town" is related to the German word "Zaun" ("fence"). Basically, what happend is that in the Middle Ages in England, only the cities had the right to construct proper city walls made from stone. The smaller towns circumvented this rule by building wooden palisades instead. It was essentially a form of legal trolling and loophole exploitation that is still part of British (and by extension, American) legal culture. In the Germanies on the other hand, this sort of bullshit would just have resulted in those towns being burned down - let's call it a consequence of German "directness".
In Poland it's also hard to translate this sort of thing. Towns and cities are all referred to as 'miasto'. There are administratively 'miasta na prawach powiatu', meaning 'cities with district rights', which is probably similar to the 'kreisfreie Stadt' You mentioned, but this is never used in everyday speech. You might say 'miasteczko' (diminutive of 'miasto') to refer to a small, usually picturesque or otherwise touristy town, but 'miasto' is used for everything from my hometown of 25K, to cities of 2M. The next category below 'miasto' is 'wieś' meaning village, (funnily enough there are villages with 'miasto' in the name, for instance ''Nowe Miasto nad Watrą' (New city on the Warta) is a village fewer than 2k residents)
We Germans have the opposite: Düsseldorf. It has 620.000 inhabitants, is Germanys seventh largest city and the capital of the most populated German state (even though it is not the most populated city of the state Nordrhein-Westfalen, that title goes to Köln/Cologne). So is is clearly a city, but its name means "Düssel village". The "Düssel" is a small river which flows into the Rhine inside Düsseldorf.
I know that this isn't the newest comment but I would like to add that in Poland there is official distinction between „miasto” and „wieś” but it hasn't anything to do with population and it's more to do with function (so if some small settelment has hospital, train station, highschool etc. it can ask government to be granted city status, which matters in tax and administrative law* (for example in „miasto” you can have only „apteka” but in rural areas you can have both „apteka” and „punkt apteczny”) but there isn't any agency wich checks if some settelment should become city or if some city should lost its status) and this city function isn't anywhere exactly defined but is more vibe-based
In my us state (Vermont), a city is a municipality with a mayor and a town is one without a mayor and city council. Instead, it had an annual town meeting day where everyone can come and vote directly on laws. A town can become a city by voting to become one, there’s no population requirement
There is a Stadt Porta Westfalica as a administrative term. But here is no densly populated settlement called "Porta Westfalica". Instead, you will find an area called "Porta Westfalica" this several small towns in it. The administration is situated in the town of Hausberge. But here are also Neesen, Eisbergen, Holzhausen, Veltheim, Kleinenbremen and so on.
In Norway, any settlement can apply to be a "by" (directly translated as "city"). As with German "Stadt", this distinction is largely meaningless nowadays. In 1992, the rules to have one's application granted were greatly loosened, resulting in the small village of Kolvereid (population ~1700) falling into the same category as Oslo (population ~700k). Both of them are considered a "by" in Norway. Bonus fun fact: The administrative center and only "by" in my home municipality is Sandvika. Its population can't be properly determined, however, because when they applied to become a by, they didn't bother including any limits for where that "by" ended. Meaning to this day, Sandvika is Norway's only by with no official borders.
It's the same here in Denmark everything is a "By", although there's and arbitrary limit of 200 people, under which it's considered a village, a place can apply to remain a By if they should drop bellow that 200.
Definitions for cities vary widely in Canada, too. I'm originally from the province of New Brunswick, which allows some surprisingly small settlements to call themselves "cities": for example, tiny Campbellton, in the north, has a population of only 7,047, yet it's officially a city. Because New Brunswick is Canada's only officially bilingual province (Québec is French-only), language can come into play, too. Riverview, part of the Greater Moncton conurbation, has a population of 20,584-big enough to be a city as per New Brunswick law-but they refuse to apply for city status because they would have to add French to the signs.
@@betaich Germanies smallest Stadt is Arnis in Schleswig-Holstein with only 300 inhabitants. The reason for that is that Germany was a conglomerate of Monarchies until 1918 - and most of the "Städte" were made "Städte" in former centuries where the rule was exactly the same as still today in England: A "City" is a "City" when the Monarch appointed it to the rank of a "City". In opposite to England with its single King or Queen Germany had a whole bunch of Rulers, including the so-called "Knights of the Empire" = "Reichsritter". One of them in the 17th. Century was Detlev von Rumohr, who was the Ruler of a small Area around a small River in Northern Germany called Schlei - and Arnis had the same importance for him than London for the King of England - and so, yes, here we are!
In my state in the US it is dependent upon how the municipality was chartered and their governing board. We only have 16 (only 4 being more than 1,000 in population) defined "towns" ranging from 30 (thirty) to 85,000. Our smallest villages are 14 and 17 in population. Smallest town is 30. And smallest city is 199.
Manderscheid in Rheinland-Pfalz was officialy recognized as a Stadt in 1998. As of 2021, it has a population of 1423 people, so it's one of the more extreme examples of settlements being called Stadt because they were oficialy recognized as such
@@silkeschumann7261 Since in Germany the definition of Stadt is any settlement that is offically recognized as Stadt (2:28), whether something is a Stadt or not is completely independent of perception. This can lead to some extreme differences between perception and definition, of which I gave an example.
Yes, I pretty much agree with you overall. Aschaffenburg looks definitely a city by all accounts. A small city if you prefer, but a city nonetheless. As for the English language, I learnt village, town, city... being that later on I've seen mentions to hamlet and metropolis on both extremes of the scale. Personally I'm happy with the 3 levels no matter the population criteria.
The smallest city (Stadt) in Austria has 86 inhabitants and is called Hardegg. Even some hamlets are bigger than this. The municipality (Stadtgemeinde) of Hardegg however, has 1304 inhabitants and includes the Stadt Hardegg and eight more villages (ironically, some of them are even bigger than Hardegg). Between Stadtgemeinde "city" and Gemeinde "rural municipality" there is a third thing called a Marktgemeinde. And in every municipality, there can be several cadastral municpalities.
And in at least a few U.S. states, being a city just means filling out the proper paperwork. The city I live in, as of the 2020 census, has a population of ~17,000 and nothing you'd consider a business district, centrally-located or otherwise.
Kleinstadt Arnis: Eine Perle an der Schlei. Mit knapp 300 Einwohnern auf einem halben Quadratkilometer Fläche ist Arnis ganz offiziell die kleinste Stadt in Deutschland. Aber nicht nur deshalb ist das Örtchen an der Schlei einen Besuch wert. Es ist ein Ort, wo sich jeder beim Namen kennt, so idyllisch wie überschaubar. The smallest City of germany
I am a geographer and the term "city" means exactly what you said about London, i.e. a town center divided into districts, a banking city, a shopping city and so on. This might be the case in Aschaffenburg, where there is at least a shopping street, but a real city is Frankfurt, with a banking district, shopping street and many "small villages" as separate residential towns. It becomes difficult if you also take the French counterpart, the Cités, which is not (only) the city center, but urban settlements outside the city, the now infamous "Banlieue".
Cities, towns, and villages in Wisconsin are defined by services that they have, but there are exceptions. I previously lived in the Town of Madison, which was separate from the City of Madison.
it's an interesting discussion. I live in a village that is part of a town (Kleinstadt) and our district city (Kreisstadt) is one of the smallest cities (Großstadt) in Germany as it has just over 100.000 people living in the urban area. and because of all the villages considered part of the town it's the 3rd largest in the district (Landkreis) even if the more urban main settlement is smaller than the next one that just has bigger communities (Gemeinden) around it so they aren't incorporated into the town... 🤔
And to clear things up, there are also Minderstadt, Flecken, Marktflecken, Siedlung,… And cities/towns or Städte and Gemeinden can be divided into Oberzentrum, Mittelzentrum mit oberzentraler Teilfunktion, Mittelzentren and Unterzentren. 😉 I personally would call a Stadt a city if it has at least one „Fußgängerzone“. 😉
Austria has "Marktgemeinde" and those places sometimes don't want to be called "Dorf". Something that I learned in Seckau, a place of 1308 inhabitants with an abbey that plays an important role in the diocese "Graz-Seckau". I also know a number of places that never achieved "Stadt" status but have developed a bit of a center of their own, with a pedestrian zone, restaurants and shops all grouped around the town hall. Yes, historically the right to set own rules, to have a judicial court and a market has been important and set towns apart from villages ...
@@eltfell Yes of course, how possibly could I forget about that? 🙂 And I forgot the „Freie Reichsstadt“ even while I was raised in one that was also the place for the „Reichskammergericht“. But that was in a different time.
I often use the word "City" for the town's inner area. In Berlin, so from Friedrichshain to Charlottenburg and from Tempelhof to Gesundbrunnen. So, in fact, inside the S-Bahn-Ring.
Over here (in Wales) we also have the idea of an ecclesiastical city, simply meaning that the town has a cathedral. So, my diocese has its anglican cathedral in the city of Tyddewi (St David's), Pembrokeshire, population 1,600. It is possible for an ecclesiastical city to not be a civic city. Such cities seem to be given the name of "cathedral town" these days, but the term "city" is still in common use for them.
yes, I think this is (was?) the Swedish definition of city too - a city has to have a cathedral, i.e. a church with a bishop residing, otherwise it is a town, regardless of size.
Landkreis (known simply as "Kreis" in some states, and likewise in the Grundgesetz) = rural district ... I suppose that is a useful way of thinking about it. However, a Landkreis is not necessarily all rural, many are in fact centred around a medium sized town/city from which they take their name. In the seventies, many former Landkreise were incorporated to make urban districts.
I live in a Stadt with 48k inhabitants. It's a Kreisfreie Stadt. I'd lovingly call it a Kleinstadt. Many of the village folks call it a Stadt or even "Die Stadt" (literally "The City"). It's an important hub for the surrounding villages, with many stores and companies. It still feels like a village to me, but I've lived in a "Großstadt" before. There is an official Stadt near here which has only 5k or so inhabitants.
OK, in Germany a place can be a "Stadt" = town (not "city"!) or a "Gemeinde" (=community). Big or small: a place is either a "Stadt" or a "Gemeinde". I live in a place with about 20,000 inhabitants. It's a "Gemeinde" - and, after some internal discussions, they decided not to apply for the title of a "Stadt" (this application would have been dealt with in Düsseldorf, capital of North-Rhine-Westphalia). Why they decided to remain a modest "Gemeinde"? Well, they would have to start more offices, mainly "social " ones - and that turned out to be not a cheap business .-).
well its a satelite city full of suburbs and with no real center. those are pretty common, the only difference is that Gütersloh is seat to the biggest publishing house in the world,
My birthplace is a city of 4300 people. It's been a city for more than 700 years and has existed since at least 944. City walls, cathedral, castle, large harbour, etc. It just hasn't grown much since.
And the video didnt even get into villages, and that some villages like Bornheim where I went to school have city status because they where decided to be the main village of a 'Gemeinde'. Now it has nearly 50.000 people living there, but thats mostly because of its status as a city.
In Austria we have 4 types that do not take into account at all, how big a place is or how many people there live: Statuarstadt, Stadtgemeinde, Marktgemeinde, Dorf. The latter is also called a Katastralgemeinde, which means, that it belongs to a Markt- or Stadtgemeinde. It doesn't even have a Bürgermeister, just an Ortsvorsteher. In Austria a City is more of the center of a large town. If we live outside the (former) citywalls, we go "in die Stadt hinein" obwohl wir außerhalb genauso in der Stadt sind.
One of my favorite movies. Cool fact that you are from this city which I also would call a town like these smaller citys in germany. Back in the days we used to call our home-Stadt (wich would be city I guess) K-town because it just had 18k people living there.
In Slovenia we kinda have it oversimplified. A city ("mesto") is basically a town ("vas") that has the mayors office of the municipality ("občina") with all other settlements in the area being relegated to simply a town. So basically if a town has a mayors office for the municipality, then its a city. If not, then its a town. In this regard, towns are some times larger in area size and even population than some cities.
In Switzerland there are very rare official cities. They are are called villages (regardless of the size). Or better municipality. I live in a villlage of 20'000 inhabitants ☺️ In Switzerland there was no popular advantages with being a city. In Germany you got the privilege of printing money and collecting customs duties. This was an attractive advantage! 😁
As a geography student, this discussion is pretty interesting to me. I'd argue, that there is no "right" definition, because there are just too many perspectives how you can define a city. In geography you have four completely different definition of what a city is: First you have a historic-judicial perspective, defined by the priviliges a city had, f.e. the right to have a market place. Second you have a statistical and administrative perspective, the official definition in germany according to the BBSR (Bundesinstitut für Bau-, Stadt- und Raumforschung) there are Großstadt (100.000 and more), Mittelstadt (20.000 and more) and Kleinstadt (5.000 and more); everything else isn't a Stadt. I don't know where your definition is from, but I'd think that this one is the most official one. The third one is the geographical perspective, probably most closely to your reasoning what to translate as "city": It defines a city by multiple aspects, like how big, dense, central (meaning how important for the sourounding area) it is, how dominant industry and the service sector are and how nuanced the area is. Lastly there is the most complicated one, the socioligical perspective: It's today mostly disproven, but still pretty intresting. It defined a city by "urbanism", an urban lifestyle, people would behave differently when living the city than in the countryside. Based on that I'd argue that even the UN can't put you on the safe side here, but your definition is still a reasonably good one. Infodump end :D
Slavic speaker here, Serbia: Word 'grad/hrad/град/город' means fortress, place with protective fence. Word for fence is 'oGRADa'. In most Slavic language it evolved into meaning 'city', but there are many medeval 'cities' that are just small fortifications, and we still call them like that for historical reasons. But there are now big, urban settlements that are called 'grad' which never had any fortress, nor are significant, just urban.
2:50 I would suggest Dorf, Markt, Stadt - Gemeinde is rather a term used by the administration (municipality administration and church administration - the pair here would be: Gemeinde & Stadt)
Actually, in administration the word "Stadt" alone doesn't have any real significance apart from the fact that any Gemeinde can call itself Stadt if it has been given that right or historically possessed that right, it doesn't make any legal difference otherwise. Also, Gemeinde is the general term that applies to all independant settlements. What does make a difference is Gemeinde vs. "kreisfreie Stadt" and (in some of the federal states) (große) Kreisstadt. The administration of a kreisfreie Stadt is in charge of both the local community administration (Gemeindeverwaltung) and the district administration (Kreisverwaltung/Stadtverwaltung). The große Kreisstadt is part of a larger district and not generally in charge of the district administration, but is in charge of some of the duties of district administration for their community territory. A community simply going by the name "Stadt" indicates neither the first nor the second one, it may very well be a part of a district and only in charge of their local community administration just like the smallest village.
Quick sidenote: Have you seen the, ehm, towns in the eastern part of the Harz that label themselves as Stadt as part of their name, namely Stadt Benneckenstein, Stadt Elbingerode and Stadt Hasselfelde? They were merged for administrative reasons in 2010 (e.g. Benneckenstein has a population of 1700), but since these three towns were granted the Stadtrecht somewhere in the past, they were allowed to keep their "Stadt" even though they are no longer individual Städte. "Stadt" in Germany really is just a label someone put on a settlement once in the past, completely disjunct of its size.
and on the opposite side you have the only district center (Kreisgemeinde?) Garmisch-Partenkirchen that isn't a Stadt just because they don't want to get the label - so the Landkreis Garmisch-Partenkirchen is the only one that has no Kreisstadt 😁
And here in Schleswig-Holstein, they kept all the individual Gemeinden (my village has 3500 people -- not tiny, but it borders Hamburg and therefore is very much a village -- and is its own Gemeinde, with a Rat and a Bürgemeister), but we share administration with a dozen or so other Gemeinden of similar sizes, which is called an Amt. This construction is used throughout Landkreis Herzogtum Lauenburg, where the Kreisstadt only has 15k pop, and the largest place is just shy of 30k.
This sounds just like an administrative oddity. I remember an episode of "extra 3 der Reale Irrsinn" that talked about some "Landkreis" (county) that had "Landkreis" in its name so officially had to be referred to as "Landkreis 'Landkreis X' " (forgot the exact name). This was a consequence of a poorly written new law governing municipality mergers. No idea whether this has since been fixed.
In my state and a lot of the US (not all states though) a "city" is just any local area that wants to incorporate into one, giving them separate powers than the county that the city resides in. This basically means that in much of the US, a city is basically any local government that isn't a county. So cities can be as small or as big as the residents choosing to incorporate it wants it to be.
In The Netherlands there is Bronkhorst. A conglomerate of several farms. But they got the right to call themselves "Stad" somewhere in the middle ages.
So Vienna would be technically the same as London, but the villages that had been surrounding the original city, which is now the 1st District, have been essentially annexed into the official city limits, which is why Vienna as a city has so much forest and agricultural space within its borders even nowadays, while still being densely populated af in other areas (sometimes even within the same district, it's really fascinating)
A lot of European cities work like that - a central district that was the original (usually medieval, sometimes even older) settlement, and a bunch of settlements around it that were assimilated into it. Still, London is unique in that the City still has its own government and administration, completely separate from the rest of London. It has its own mayor (with the supremely excessive title of The Right Honourable The Lord Mayor of London), not to be confused with the mayor of Greater London. This is what happens when privileges over a millennium old are carried over into the 21st century, I suppose.
There's a big difference. In the case of Vienna, those surrounding towns and villages were officially incorporated into the city; in the case of London, the City of London refused to allow any other settlement to be incorporated into it; and to this day it has its own identity, its own police force, and its own mayor, as well as being its own county. Everything else is, for administrative purposes, "Greater London", which is a conurbation of many settlements, including the City of Westminster (where the Houses of Parliament are, and which has city status all by itself), organized into 32 London boroughs. It does have a mayor for the whole area, who heads the Greater London Authority, but that's only one way to define "London": less than half of Greater London counts as "London" for postal addresses, while the Office for National Statistics counts the City of London, most (but not quite all) of Greater London, and dozens of towns and villages which for administrative purposes are in the counties of Surrey, Essex, Kent, Berkshire, and Hertfordshire.
@@rewboss I get the impression that in the UK, administrative units aren't as neatly defined as in Germany where you have a clear hierarchy Bundesland - Regierungsbezirk - Kreis - Gemeinde which always applies, with the only caveat that the intermediate levels might not always exist. No such simple hierarchy apparently exists in the UK, or England. For example, is "Greater London" a municipality? It appears to be, since it has a mayor. But if it isn't, what is it? Conversely if it is, how can some of its subdivisions also be municipalities. Post codes do not generally coincide with municipalities in both countries, because the postal service isn't attached to administrative units.
@@xaverlustig3581 No, it's not so regular in Germany either. What is Berlin ? Bundesland - Regierungsbezirk - Kreis - Gemeinde ? It's everything at the same time. The administrative functions are different distributed. Is "Kreuzberg" a Kreis or Gemeinde ? The head is called a mayor. But it has functions of Kreis and Gemeinde at the same time.
@@holger_p Berlin and Hamburg each are a Bundesland, a kreisfreie Stadt and a Gemeinde. The Regierungsbezirk level is omitted. Kreuzberg is nothing, it is an administrative subdivision of the Gemeinde Berlin but has no autonomy on any level. It is not a "Gebietskörperschaft", only Berlin is one. (Or Kreuzberg used to not be that, because it doesn't exist any more)
Wonderfully confusing isn't it. One thing that I noticed, but which is definitely colloquial, was that in England people who lived on the outskirts of a settlement, would speak of "going down town" when they lived in a city. But would refer to "going to the city" when they lived in a large town. Insecurity I guess. Cites here in the Netherlands are much smaller than those from my younger times in England. But I am happy with that, and I think the UN has it about right. From the City of Den Haag. Capital City. But only the governmental capital?
2:55 that's not quite true, being a Stadt also has some benefits for the local government because a Stadt has a different tax law than a Gemeinde. At least in my home state of lower Saxony these differences mean higher taxes and thus there are many places that could become cities, but that have a population that is quite content with staying a town.
Here in New Zealand it's quite simple historically. Does it have a cathedral? Later up until 1989 a City had to have 20,000 people to be referred to as a City. After 1989 the cutoff point is 50,000. Tauranga made the jump from town to city relatively recently.
In Austria there is Statuarstadt (cities and a few privileged towns), Stadt (town), Marktgemeinde (town withtout the right being called town) and Gemeinde, Dorf (village, maybe town). Most of them is historical. There is a "Stadt" with 434 inhabitants (Rattenberg, more than 700 years old) and a "Gemeinde" with 13.575 inhabitants (Wals-Siezenheim).
Categorizing settlements could get very confusing. The place I live is a "Gemeinde", which is often translated as village. But with its about 10,000 citizens, 5 supermarkets and 2 hospitals I would usually call it town, while speaking English. The next bigger place is a Stadt, a - as I learned in this video - Mittelstadt (I would ususally use the term Kleinstadt), in English I also say town. The surrounding places (Gemeinden) building an "Amt" together, one of them consisting out of several villages itself. And finally, there is the big city, also called "Stadt" in German. But the younger generation around here has the perfect solution for that chaos: every village, irrespective of it is its own Gemeinde or has its own administration, they call "Dorf", the place I live in they use the English word "Town", the Mittelstadt is "Stadt" and for the big city they also use the English term "City". 😅 ~typos corrected
Landstadt my be some artificial defnition, but 5000 is a Dorf. And we have a Weiler, which is a settlement of 5 to 10 buildings. Anything between larger than 5.000 to smaller than 10.000 can be either, village aka Dorf or small town aka Kleinstadt. Anything larger 10.000 and smaller 50.000 is clearly a Kleinstadt. Larger than 50.000 to less than 250.000 is a Stadt and above than is probably where the Großstadt starts. City in Germany is closer related to the town center than to size most of the time. Though small towns usually don't have a city only a main shopping street or two.
Oh ja. Bringt Erinnerungen an das Studium zurück. An die Vorlesung "Die Stadt im Mittelalter". Entsprechend Definitionen, wie verschiedene Siedlungen bezeichnet werden. Wie Oppidum oder Urbs.
In the Netherlands "city", wich is "stad", depends on whether it has been given "city-rights", wich is "stadsrechten", meaning whether the ruler has/had given the town these rights.. so therefore a "town" wit 50,000 people can be a "stad", while a "city" with e.g. 1,000,000 people can be a town..
Especialy after thinking over all these definitions, delimiters and historic developments it's not a shame and even advisable to use those terms depending on the stories objective. One idea striking me is the common use of 'city' as an anglicism in german refering to the city-center formaly known as Fußgängerzone or Innenstadt. therefor many german cties are proud to have a city. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Thank you for todays delicious dessert.
In Romania we have "orașe" (singular "oraș") and "municipii" (singular "municipiu"; think "municipality" in English). The difference being that the latter are larger in population, more urbanized and more important than the former, though there are no specific criteria and the upgrade from "oraș" status to "municipiu" status is determined by law. The capital and all county seats are "municipii", and most counties contain at least a couple of "municipii". Confusingly, however, the term "oraș" is also the generic Romanian word for "city" - one may refer to Bucharest or Constanța or Timișoara as an "oraș" or a "municipiu" depending on whether one is going for brevity or accuracy, but one would always refer to Brussels or Cape Town or Tokyo as an "oraș" and never as a "municipiu". I suppose the term closest in meaning to the English-language "town" would be "orășel" (the diminutive of "oraș"), but that's just not used as often. In Romania, the dichotomy of (large) city vs (small) town is not as important as that of Bucharest vs "provincie" (anywhere outside the capital regardless of whether it's urban or rural, since people in Bucharest presumably won't bother making the distinction; think "provincial" in English) and city vs country ("țară", with the same double meaning as in English).
What I was always wondering was the word town - which we were taught to translate as "Kleine Stadt" in school - vs village ("Dorf"?) Because especially with Americans, they seem to only speak of towns, no matter the size or relevance... Is that just an American thing or can anyone in the know explain why you would use the word town in context of just a few hundered residents?
Afaik Americans don't really have the concept of the village in the meaning of a small settlement mainly meant to provide safety and community, but not much trade or commerce, as basically all farms (at least starting west of the appalachians) are solidary, with towns systematically placed as centres of trade and commerce.
I grew up in a place in Kansas with fewer than 200 people but legally it is a 'city'. In Nebraska, where I now live, we have villages & cities. Of course, a village is defined as having fewer than 800 people, anything larger than that is a city.
Hu, interesting. I come from a Kleinstadt, which would translate to small town here. Ca. 16.000 inhabitants. Because we did not have big department stores, we would have to travel to the next bigger city, a Großstadt, or large city with 90.000+ inhabitants. So that is also a usefull distinction for me: You need shoes, furtniture, or a bicycle? Go to the area of the next larger population center, because, for the life of you, you cannot find those stores where you habitate.
My dad grew up in a small German Stadt that has only like 20k inhabitants. It is a Stadt, because some noble ruler gave it that title who knows how long ago. But my mom comes from a city of half a million people and she always teases him about his home city actually being a village.
In Bavaria there is also the offcial distinction of "Markt". Any Landgemeinde (rural municipality) that isn't a Stadt (town/city) can be recognized as a Marktgemeinde allowing them to add the title "Markt" in front. (Markt meaning market, hence in olden days meant the right to hold a weekly market) It get's silly when a Marktgemeinde has "Markt" as part of its proper name, like 'Markt Schwaben', which leads to the officially correct 'Markt Markt Schwaben'. Additionally there's also the predicate "Bad" that any Gemeinde can add to its proper name, when it get's offically recognized as a spa town. So you can mix both Markt and Bad, so you get places like 'Markt Bad Abbach', which is both a Marktgemeinde and a spa town. For true sillyness 'Markt Schwaben' should be recognized as a spa town, which would make it offically 'Markt Bad Markt Schwaben'.
I would have loved a mention of Arnis, which is the smallest "Stadt" at around 250 inhabitants, and maybe Seevetal, which is the largest "non-Stadt" with just over 40,000 (which has the UN on its side). Of course this still doesn't address the distinction between town and city.
Here in the Netherlands we did away with the term 'stad' (city) with the 1848 Constitution. The stad had already lost its priviliges aroun 1800. These days we only have municipalities. With the ongoing merger of municipalities (from 800+ in the 1980s to ~400 now) a municipality can have 2 or more historic cities. All municipalities are governed the same way with 1 exception: the 3 islands of Bonaire, Saba and St. Eustatius in the Antilles that are special municipalities due to their special needs far away from the motherland.
Can you explain how the points system for driving licenses work in Germany? How can I get them, what happened when people get an specified number of points, does it counts for foreigners and more?
You get them for doing things wrong while driving, from parking where you are not supposed to park to speeding and driving drunk. If you reach8 points you lose your license and aren't allowed to drive anymore.
@@betaich minor parking infringements or minor speed limit issues won't bring you a point. Massive speeding, tailgating on motorways, unsecured load etc. will. Driving under influence will void the license immediately. After the suspension time you may have to undergo the MPU (medical-psychological investigation). The modern version of the Holy Inquisition. The points are often referred to as "Flensburg points" as the traffic authority is located there. In former times some people tried to cheat by making a foreign license. Nowadays it won't help to present a newly made license from another country while your original one is under suspension.
Tokyo, a city with more people than 150 countries, and Constantinople in 1450, with 50 thousand people. One independent, the other not. Another way you might prefer is percentage of the population of it´s parent sovereign jurisdiction. If in a federation, that means the regional level like Bavaria and not Germany as a whole for instance. Toronto has 2.6 million people in a country of just under 40 million. You could do it like we define mountains, such as how Tom Scott said a mountain was a peak with a prominence of 300 metres. If the settlement dominates its surroundings for a certain fraction of the country, with nothing exceeding its size and economy for a certain proportion of its parent county, it is a city.
Ah, Tokyo (Officially the "Tokyo Metropolitan Area" ) is a completely special can of worms in itself that is functionally a "Prefecture", so something akin to a U.S. State or a German Bundesland, that officially consist of 62 municipalities, 23 special wards, 26 cities, 5 towns and 8 villages, as far as I know each with their own major. 😆
In Sweden there officially are no cities and towns, just kommuner, "communes". Some kommuns do call themselves stad, city. That is because they have old city privileges dating before 1971. Like my kommun Nacka, that got city privileges in 1949. It has over 100.000 inhabitants, but still no one really calls it city.
Simple - has it been incorporated as a city? Then it is a city. My home town in Canada changed from a town to a city thru incorporation when it had around 12,500 residents.
The US state where I live defines a city as any incorporated municipality, regardless of population, so the small town where I work-population 300 or so-is officially a city, despite having only a bar/restaurant, public library, and post office and no shops.
My ancestral... place in Croatia has 1500 inhabitants and we NEVER call it a village. We have a port, a seafaring history, small industry, nowdays sadly mostly turist industry. Is "citylet" a legitimate English word?
In Poland it's very much like in Germany, no distinction between town and city, all that matters is whether it has the title of a city or not. Because of this, the largest Polish village is 12,000 people while the smallest city/town is Opatowiec with only 336 people. Why? Because historic reasons. Apparently there was a town of only 8 people in Croatia but I'm not sure if this is still the case.
In Sweden there's no legal concept of a city ("stad") since 1971, only "tätort", maybe best translated as an urban area. "Ort" is a cognate to the German word spelled the same way, except it refers to a settlement and not a place in general. "Tät" means dense.
To make it worse, the definition of Stadt differs from Bundesland to Bundesland.If you read the fineprint, it offen only has a administrative meaning. So, it is up to you what you want to tell your followers.
And btw, many Germans mean by *city* the *center of a town* if they say something like _„Lass uns doch einfach einfach in der _*_City_*_ von Hannover treffen, dort gibt's viel mehr Geschäfte und Restaurants.“_ "Let's just meet in the *center* of Hanover, there are much more stores and restaurants."
In some German cities I have seen signs pointing which way to go to "City". Which in this case doesn't refer to the whole city but to the center of it. "Downtown" or "Inner city" or "Old town" may all mean vaguely the same but that depends on the place. Calling the center of a city the City might have something to do with the City of London, but I don't know whether this usage is common in English speaking countries. Is there any English speaking city (except for London which has a City within the city) that refers to its center as "City"?
I'm pretty sure any other city - large or small - in the UK has signs for 'City Centre'. London doesn't have a city centre, so such a location on a sign would be meaningless. As you approach from several miles/kms out, you'll see signs for Central London, but as you get closer they narrow down to e.g. City, Westminster, Southwark, etc. When in central London the signs will indicate nearby districts, as well as 'the North' South-west, etc.
In England the old basis for being a City was having a Cathedral. That's why Sandfor...sorry Wells is a city and Frome isn't. Usually once a city always a city, but it can go the other way as Rochester found out.
There also is a thing, bigger than a "Dorf" and smaller than a "Stadt". Its called "Flecken". (Also on the entrance-sign.) How would you translate this?
I have a translation question. Wouldn't be Hauptstadt, Bundesstadt and Reichsstadt be a city but the other Städte are towns ? its hard to translate for me because their is nothign simmilar in english.
"Hauptstadt" translates as "capital city", "Bundesstadt" is what the Swiss call Berne and the Germans used to call Bonn when it was the seat of government and can be literally translated as "federal city", and "Reichsstadt" is part of the phrase "Freie und Reichsstadt" which is translated as "free imperial city" (a city that was largely autonomous and was represented at the Imperial Diet).
I once made the mistake of referring to a city largely defined by its university as a “university town” and a local on Reddit went bananas, saying that it was indeed a city and I was slandering it by dubbing it a mere town.
My city, Reutlingen, has often liked to call itself Germany's smallest large city (it's just over 100,000). I don't know if it's still current though. Historically though, it was a "free imperial city". They hold the "Schwortag" every summer for a bit of fun.
@@Thiesi unfortunately, they've now moved it to Metzingen. I'm not looking forward to having to go there if we get any packages that customs wants to inspect.
I often have this problem when translating to English, too. In Croatia we only have "city" and "village" districts. To make things worse, the population sizes overlap greatly. The smallest "city" has a population of about 1500, and the largest "village" almost 15000.
Total and utter chaos where nothing makes any sense whatsoever---that's how I like it.
Ha! Until recently the smallest "city" in Latvia had a population of 500 (and growing).
In Germany it's a little bit more extreme
the smallest city has around 300 people, the largest village around 40000
@@PeterAuto1 r u sure about that?
@@MusikCassette Größte Gemeinde (municipality; not village) in Deutschland ohne Stadtrecht ist Seevetal in Niedersachsen, südlich an Hamburg angrenzend, mit ca. 42.000 Einwohnern.
Kleinste Stadt in Deutschland ist Arnis (Stadtrecht seit 1934 durch die Nationalsozialisten; eine Kuriosität der Geschichte) in Schleswig-Holstein; eine Halbinsel in der Schlei. Sie hat ca. 270 Einwohner und liegt im Kreis Schleswig-Flensburg.
Es gibt in Deutschland etwa 100 Städte (Stadtrecht) - von insgesamt ca. 2000 Städten - mit weniger als 2.500 Einwohnern.
When discussing the German language, it should also be pointed out that we don't really distinguish between "city" and "town". The German word "Stadt" can really refer to either.
Btw, there used to be a cognade of "Stadt" in Old English: "stede". The word is obsolete these days, but can still be found in many placenames in England ending on "-sted" or "-stead".
How was stede used in Old English? Cause it also sounds like a cognate to "Stätte" to me.
Was it used as a word for a type of builtup area like Stadt or could it also just have been used for basically any location like Stätte?
The my language, Polish doesn't make a distinction between a city or town. "Miasto" is a word for both.
There are many places that would be a town, or even a city if you look at the map, but they would not be called a city in germany. Grossgemeinde, Gemeinde, etc. They simply are not big enough. You could call them a dorf or village, but that may not describe their regional importance. there are historical reasons to be a "Stadt" like Schweinfurt for example, which has been around for over 1200 years, and it is still a Stadt today, even by size requirement. And calling a city a Stadt by size of over 50,000 may be arbitrary, but it is a way to do it. then you have administrative functions that make a place a Stadt. While you may not make a distinction, there is a distinct difference. Kreisstadt, Freie Kreisstadt, Hauptstadt, Stadt, Ort, Gemeinde, Dorf, etc. viele gebraeuchliche Bezeichnungen.
@@Antanana_Rivo "Stätte" and "Stadt" are cognates, too, so this association comes as no surprise.
The English word "town" is related to the German word "Zaun" ("fence").
Basically, what happend is that in the Middle Ages in England, only the cities had the right to construct proper city walls made from stone. The smaller towns circumvented this rule by building wooden palisades instead. It was essentially a form of legal trolling and loophole exploitation that is still part of British (and by extension, American) legal culture. In the Germanies on the other hand, this sort of bullshit would just have resulted in those towns being burned down - let's call it a consequence of German "directness".
In Poland it's also hard to translate this sort of thing. Towns and cities are all referred to as 'miasto'. There are administratively 'miasta na prawach powiatu', meaning 'cities with district rights', which is probably similar to the 'kreisfreie Stadt' You mentioned, but this is never used in everyday speech. You might say 'miasteczko' (diminutive of 'miasto') to refer to a small, usually picturesque or otherwise touristy town, but 'miasto' is used for everything from my hometown of 25K, to cities of 2M. The next category below 'miasto' is 'wieś' meaning village, (funnily enough there are villages with 'miasto' in the name, for instance ''Nowe Miasto nad Watrą' (New city on the Warta) is a village fewer than 2k residents)
We Germans have the opposite: Düsseldorf. It has 620.000 inhabitants, is Germanys seventh largest city and the capital of the most populated German state (even though it is not the most populated city of the state Nordrhein-Westfalen, that title goes to Köln/Cologne). So is is clearly a city, but its name means "Düssel village". The "Düssel" is a small river which flows into the Rhine inside Düsseldorf.
@@0000-z4z Yes - but Düsseldorf got its name as it really was only a village at the river Düssel.
I know that this isn't the newest comment but I would like to add that in Poland there is official distinction between „miasto” and „wieś” but it hasn't anything to do with population and it's more to do with function (so if some small settelment has hospital, train station, highschool etc. it can ask government to be granted city status, which matters in tax and administrative law* (for example in „miasto” you can have only „apteka” but in rural areas you can have both „apteka” and „punkt apteczny”) but there isn't any agency wich checks if some settelment should become city or if some city should lost its status) and this city function isn't anywhere exactly defined but is more vibe-based
In my us state (Vermont), a city is a municipality with a mayor and a town is one without a mayor and city council. Instead, it had an annual town meeting day where everyone can come and vote directly on laws. A town can become a city by voting to become one, there’s no population requirement
There is a Stadt Porta Westfalica as a administrative term. But here is no densly populated settlement called "Porta Westfalica". Instead, you will find an area called "Porta Westfalica" this several small towns in it. The administration is situated in the town of Hausberge. But here are also Neesen, Eisbergen, Holzhausen, Veltheim, Kleinenbremen and so on.
In Norway, any settlement can apply to be a "by" (directly translated as "city"). As with German "Stadt", this distinction is largely meaningless nowadays. In 1992, the rules to have one's application granted were greatly loosened, resulting in the small village of Kolvereid (population ~1700) falling into the same category as Oslo (population ~700k). Both of them are considered a "by" in Norway.
Bonus fun fact: The administrative center and only "by" in my home municipality is Sandvika. Its population can't be properly determined, however, because when they applied to become a by, they didn't bother including any limits for where that "by" ended. Meaning to this day, Sandvika is Norway's only by with no official borders.
It's the same here in Denmark everything is a "By", although there's and arbitrary limit of 200 people, under which it's considered a village, a place can apply to remain a By if they should drop bellow that 200.
Definitions for cities vary widely in Canada, too. I'm originally from the province of New Brunswick, which allows some surprisingly small settlements to call themselves "cities": for example, tiny Campbellton, in the north, has a population of only 7,047, yet it's officially a city. Because New Brunswick is Canada's only officially bilingual province (Québec is French-only), language can come into play, too. Riverview, part of the Greater Moncton conurbation, has a population of 20,584-big enough to be a city as per New Brunswick law-but they refuse to apply for city status because they would have to add French to the signs.
My home in Germany oficiialy has city status (Stadt) and has a population of 9k.
@@betaich Germanies smallest Stadt is Arnis in Schleswig-Holstein with only 300 inhabitants.
The reason for that is that Germany was a conglomerate of Monarchies until 1918 - and most of the "Städte" were made "Städte" in former centuries where the rule was exactly the same as still today in England: A "City" is a "City" when the Monarch appointed it to the rank of a "City". In opposite to England with its single King or Queen Germany had a whole bunch of Rulers, including the so-called "Knights of the Empire" = "Reichsritter". One of them in the 17th. Century was Detlev von Rumohr, who was the Ruler of a small Area around a small River in Northern Germany called Schlei - and Arnis had the same importance for him than London for the King of England - and so, yes, here we are!
I have always enjoyed your videos and this one did not disappoint!
In my state in the US it is dependent upon how the municipality was chartered and their governing board. We only have 16 (only 4 being more than 1,000 in population) defined "towns" ranging from 30 (thirty) to 85,000. Our smallest villages are 14 and 17 in population. Smallest town is 30. And smallest city is 199.
Manderscheid in Rheinland-Pfalz was officialy recognized as a Stadt in 1998. As of 2021, it has a population of 1423 people, so it's one of the more extreme examples of settlements being called Stadt because they were oficialy recognized as such
Yeah, but a document doesn't change the perception. 1423 is a small village.
@@silkeschumann7261 Since in Germany the definition of Stadt is any settlement that is offically recognized as Stadt (2:28), whether something is a Stadt or not is completely independent of perception. This can lead to some extreme differences between perception and definition, of which I gave an example.
I'd call it "Landstadt"
Yes, I pretty much agree with you overall. Aschaffenburg looks definitely a city by all accounts. A small city if you prefer, but a city nonetheless.
As for the English language, I learnt village, town, city... being that later on I've seen mentions to hamlet and metropolis on both extremes of the scale. Personally I'm happy with the 3 levels no matter the population criteria.
The smallest city (Stadt) in Austria has 86 inhabitants and is called Hardegg. Even some hamlets are bigger than this. The municipality (Stadtgemeinde) of Hardegg however, has 1304 inhabitants and includes the Stadt Hardegg and eight more villages (ironically, some of them are even bigger than Hardegg).
Between Stadtgemeinde "city" and Gemeinde "rural municipality" there is a third thing called a Marktgemeinde. And in every municipality, there can be several cadastral municpalities.
2:35 So important distinctions give them their "Stadtus?"
And in at least a few U.S. states, being a city just means filling out the proper paperwork. The city I live in, as of the 2020 census, has a population of ~17,000 and nothing you'd consider a business district, centrally-located or otherwise.
The simple explanation I got for the US was to think of most cities as administrative districts and ignore population/density etc
Kleinstadt Arnis: Eine Perle an der Schlei. Mit knapp 300 Einwohnern auf einem halben Quadratkilometer Fläche ist Arnis ganz offiziell die kleinste Stadt in Deutschland. Aber nicht nur deshalb ist das Örtchen an der Schlei einen Besuch wert. Es ist ein Ort, wo sich jeder beim Namen kennt, so idyllisch wie überschaubar.
The smallest City of germany
I am a geographer and the term "city" means exactly what you said about London, i.e. a town center divided into districts, a banking city, a shopping city and so on. This might be the case in Aschaffenburg, where there is at least a shopping street, but a real city is Frankfurt, with a banking district, shopping street and many "small villages" as separate residential towns. It becomes difficult if you also take the French counterpart, the Cités, which is not (only) the city center, but urban settlements outside the city, the now infamous "Banlieue".
Another informative video
Cities, towns, and villages in Wisconsin are defined by services that they have, but there are exceptions. I previously lived in the Town of Madison, which was separate from the City of Madison.
1:55 counter-example: Vaduz, capital town of Liechtenstein
it's an interesting discussion. I live in a village that is part of a town (Kleinstadt) and our district city (Kreisstadt) is one of the smallest cities (Großstadt) in Germany as it has just over 100.000 people living in the urban area.
and because of all the villages considered part of the town it's the 3rd largest in the district (Landkreis) even if the more urban main settlement is smaller than the next one that just has bigger communities (Gemeinden) around it so they aren't incorporated into the town... 🤔
And to clear things up, there are also Minderstadt, Flecken, Marktflecken, Siedlung,… And cities/towns or Städte and Gemeinden can be divided into Oberzentrum, Mittelzentrum mit oberzentraler Teilfunktion, Mittelzentren and Unterzentren. 😉 I personally would call a Stadt a city if it has at least one „Fußgängerzone“. 😉
You forgot "Weiler".
Austria has "Marktgemeinde" and those places sometimes don't want to be called "Dorf". Something that I learned in Seckau, a place of 1308 inhabitants with an abbey that plays an important role in the diocese "Graz-Seckau".
I also know a number of places that never achieved "Stadt" status but have developed a bit of a center of their own, with a pedestrian zone, restaurants and shops all grouped around the town hall. Yes, historically the right to set own rules, to have a judicial court and a market has been important and set towns apart from villages ...
@@eltfell Yes of course, how possibly could I forget about that? 🙂 And I forgot the „Freie Reichsstadt“ even while I was raised in one that was also the place for the „Reichskammergericht“. But that was in a different time.
@@Al69BfR Or how about the Hansestadt or Freie Hansestadt?
@@KaiHenningsen Yes. And I‘m sure we find more examples to further clear things up. 🙂
In the end each city, town, village and settlement has its own history that makes it unique.
I think it would be interesting to hear your story on how/why you moved to Germany Rewboss
There actually is a capital village: Vaduz, Liechtenstein never gained the status of a "Stadt" and therefore is only described as "Hauptort"
I often use the word "City" for the town's inner area.
In Berlin, so from Friedrichshain to Charlottenburg and from Tempelhof to Gesundbrunnen. So, in fact, inside the S-Bahn-Ring.
I haven’t been this early since…. Ever
Over here (in Wales) we also have the idea of an ecclesiastical city, simply meaning that the town has a cathedral. So, my diocese has its anglican cathedral in the city of Tyddewi (St David's), Pembrokeshire, population 1,600.
It is possible for an ecclesiastical city to not be a civic city. Such cities seem to be given the name of "cathedral town" these days, but the term "city" is still in common use for them.
True, brecon Town has a cathedral, I think its linked to Swansea so it isn't a ecclesiastical city
yes, I think this is (was?) the Swedish definition of city too - a city has to have a cathedral, i.e. a church with a bishop residing, otherwise it is a town, regardless of size.
A district ruled by a bishop is a see. The place where the bishop resides is therefore a see-ty - city!
Really interesting and funny. Here is a video I would like to see from you, if I may: "Ausflug zum Wertstoffhof"
Your statement: Don't argue with me, I have the UN on my side. Love it, just hilarious. 😂
Landkreis (known simply as "Kreis" in some states, and likewise in the Grundgesetz) = rural district ... I suppose that is a useful way of thinking about it. However, a Landkreis is not necessarily all rural, many are in fact centred around a medium sized town/city from which they take their name. In the seventies, many former Landkreise were incorporated to make urban districts.
And then you have the Landkreis Harburg, which does not, in fact, contain Harburg. Harburg exists, but is part of Hamburg.
Ah maybe a Rewboss video will get my mind off of this guy i cant stop thinking of for just a second......annnd he's back in it
I live in a Stadt with 48k inhabitants. It's a Kreisfreie Stadt. I'd lovingly call it a Kleinstadt. Many of the village folks call it a Stadt or even "Die Stadt" (literally "The City"). It's an important hub for the surrounding villages, with many stores and companies. It still feels like a village to me, but I've lived in a "Großstadt" before. There is an official Stadt near here which has only 5k or so inhabitants.
OK, in Germany a place can be a "Stadt" = town (not "city"!) or a "Gemeinde" (=community). Big or small: a place is either a "Stadt" or a "Gemeinde". I live in a place with about 20,000 inhabitants. It's a "Gemeinde" - and, after some internal discussions, they decided not to apply for the title of a "Stadt" (this application would have been dealt with in Düsseldorf, capital of North-Rhine-Westphalia). Why they decided to remain a modest "Gemeinde"? Well, they would have to start more offices, mainly "social " ones - and that turned out to be not a cheap business .-).
Same for my Gemeinde: Steinhagen, East Westphalia, population: 21,500.
Since 2018 Gütersloh is officially the smallest Großstadt, crossed the 100,000 inhabitants mark
well its a satelite city full of suburbs and with no real center. those are pretty common, the only difference is that Gütersloh is seat to the biggest publishing house in the world,
@@nox5555 and it's ugly
@@ChristophS every town in that region is...
My birthplace is a city of 4300 people.
It's been a city for more than 700 years and has existed since at least 944.
City walls, cathedral, castle, large harbour, etc.
It just hasn't grown much since.
And the video didnt even get into villages, and that some villages like Bornheim where I went to school have city status because they where decided to be the main village of a 'Gemeinde'. Now it has nearly 50.000 people living there, but thats mostly because of its status as a city.
In Austria we have 4 types that do not take into account at all, how big a place is or how many people there live: Statuarstadt, Stadtgemeinde, Marktgemeinde, Dorf. The latter is also called a Katastralgemeinde, which means, that it belongs to a Markt- or Stadtgemeinde. It doesn't even have a Bürgermeister, just an Ortsvorsteher.
In Austria a City is more of the center of a large town. If we live outside the (former) citywalls, we go "in die Stadt hinein" obwohl wir außerhalb genauso in der Stadt sind.
One of my favorite movies. Cool fact that you are from this city which I also would call a town like these smaller citys in germany. Back in the days we used to call our home-Stadt (wich would be city I guess) K-town because it just had 18k people living there.
With this Switzerland would have only 10 cities: Zurich, Geneva, Basel, Lausanne, *Bern*, Winterthur, Lucerne, St. Gallen, Lugano and Biel.
What Kategorie a settlement feels like depends strongly on the type of public transportation we find there.
In Slovenia we kinda have it oversimplified.
A city ("mesto") is basically a town ("vas") that has the mayors office of the municipality ("občina") with all other settlements in the area being relegated to simply a town.
So basically if a town has a mayors office for the municipality, then its a city. If not, then its a town. In this regard, towns are some times larger in area size and even population than some cities.
In Switzerland there are very rare official cities. They are are called villages (regardless of the size). Or better municipality.
I live in a villlage of 20'000 inhabitants ☺️
In Switzerland there was no popular advantages with being a city. In Germany you got the privilege of printing money and collecting customs duties. This was an attractive advantage! 😁
As a geography student, this discussion is pretty interesting to me. I'd argue, that there is no "right" definition, because there are just too many perspectives how you can define a city. In geography you have four completely different definition of what a city is:
First you have a historic-judicial perspective, defined by the priviliges a city had, f.e. the right to have a market place.
Second you have a statistical and administrative perspective, the official definition in germany according to the BBSR (Bundesinstitut für Bau-, Stadt- und Raumforschung) there are Großstadt (100.000 and more), Mittelstadt (20.000 and more) and Kleinstadt (5.000 and more); everything else isn't a Stadt. I don't know where your definition is from, but I'd think that this one is the most official one.
The third one is the geographical perspective, probably most closely to your reasoning what to translate as "city": It defines a city by multiple aspects, like how big, dense, central (meaning how important for the sourounding area) it is, how dominant industry and the service sector are and how nuanced the area is.
Lastly there is the most complicated one, the socioligical perspective: It's today mostly disproven, but still pretty intresting. It defined a city by "urbanism", an urban lifestyle, people would behave differently when living the city than in the countryside.
Based on that I'd argue that even the UN can't put you on the safe side here, but your definition is still a reasonably good one.
Infodump end :D
Slavic speaker here, Serbia:
Word 'grad/hrad/град/город' means fortress, place with protective fence. Word for fence is 'oGRADa'.
In most Slavic language it evolved into meaning 'city', but there are many medeval 'cities' that are just small fortifications, and we still call them like that for historical reasons.
But there are now big, urban settlements that are called 'grad' which never had any fortress, nor are significant, just urban.
3:23 - So what would a place with 20,000 citizens be called or one with 100,000 then?
2:50 I would suggest Dorf, Markt, Stadt - Gemeinde is rather a term used by the administration (municipality administration and church administration - the pair here would be: Gemeinde & Stadt)
Actually, in administration the word "Stadt" alone doesn't have any real significance apart from the fact that any Gemeinde can call itself Stadt if it has been given that right or historically possessed that right, it doesn't make any legal difference otherwise. Also, Gemeinde is the general term that applies to all independant settlements. What does make a difference is Gemeinde vs. "kreisfreie Stadt" and (in some of the federal states) (große) Kreisstadt. The administration of a kreisfreie Stadt is in charge of both the local community administration (Gemeindeverwaltung) and the district administration (Kreisverwaltung/Stadtverwaltung). The große Kreisstadt is part of a larger district and not generally in charge of the district administration, but is in charge of some of the duties of district administration for their community territory. A community simply going by the name "Stadt" indicates neither the first nor the second one, it may very well be a part of a district and only in charge of their local community administration just like the smallest village.
Quick sidenote: Have you seen the, ehm, towns in the eastern part of the Harz that label themselves as Stadt as part of their name, namely Stadt Benneckenstein, Stadt Elbingerode and Stadt Hasselfelde? They were merged for administrative reasons in 2010 (e.g. Benneckenstein has a population of 1700), but since these three towns were granted the Stadtrecht somewhere in the past, they were allowed to keep their "Stadt" even though they are no longer individual Städte. "Stadt" in Germany really is just a label someone put on a settlement once in the past, completely disjunct of its size.
and on the opposite side you have the only district center (Kreisgemeinde?) Garmisch-Partenkirchen that isn't a Stadt just because they don't want to get the label - so the Landkreis Garmisch-Partenkirchen is the only one that has no Kreisstadt 😁
And here in Schleswig-Holstein, they kept all the individual Gemeinden (my village has 3500 people -- not tiny, but it borders Hamburg and therefore is very much a village -- and is its own Gemeinde, with a Rat and a Bürgemeister), but we share administration with a dozen or so other Gemeinden of similar sizes, which is called an Amt. This construction is used throughout Landkreis Herzogtum Lauenburg, where the Kreisstadt only has 15k pop, and the largest place is just shy of 30k.
That reminds me of Tom Scott's video about Rochester.
This sounds just like an administrative oddity. I remember an episode of "extra 3 der Reale Irrsinn" that talked about some "Landkreis" (county) that had "Landkreis" in its name so officially had to be referred to as "Landkreis 'Landkreis X' " (forgot the exact name). This was a consequence of a poorly written new law governing municipality mergers. No idea whether this has since been fixed.
@@arthur_p_dent Ah, Ireland used to have a King's County County Council.
In Ireland a city is designated as a place with a hall, university and library
In my state and a lot of the US (not all states though) a "city" is just any local area that wants to incorporate into one, giving them separate powers than the county that the city resides in. This basically means that in much of the US, a city is basically any local government that isn't a county. So cities can be as small or as big as the residents choosing to incorporate it wants it to be.
In The Netherlands there is Bronkhorst. A conglomerate of several farms. But they got the right to call themselves "Stad" somewhere in the middle ages.
So Vienna would be technically the same as London, but the villages that had been surrounding the original city, which is now the 1st District, have been essentially annexed into the official city limits, which is why Vienna as a city has so much forest and agricultural space within its borders even nowadays, while still being densely populated af in other areas (sometimes even within the same district, it's really fascinating)
A lot of European cities work like that - a central district that was the original (usually medieval, sometimes even older) settlement, and a bunch of settlements around it that were assimilated into it. Still, London is unique in that the City still has its own government and administration, completely separate from the rest of London. It has its own mayor (with the supremely excessive title of The Right Honourable The Lord Mayor of London), not to be confused with the mayor of Greater London. This is what happens when privileges over a millennium old are carried over into the 21st century, I suppose.
There's a big difference. In the case of Vienna, those surrounding towns and villages were officially incorporated into the city; in the case of London, the City of London refused to allow any other settlement to be incorporated into it; and to this day it has its own identity, its own police force, and its own mayor, as well as being its own county. Everything else is, for administrative purposes, "Greater London", which is a conurbation of many settlements, including the City of Westminster (where the Houses of Parliament are, and which has city status all by itself), organized into 32 London boroughs. It does have a mayor for the whole area, who heads the Greater London Authority, but that's only one way to define "London": less than half of Greater London counts as "London" for postal addresses, while the Office for National Statistics counts the City of London, most (but not quite all) of Greater London, and dozens of towns and villages which for administrative purposes are in the counties of Surrey, Essex, Kent, Berkshire, and Hertfordshire.
@@rewboss I get the impression that in the UK, administrative units aren't as neatly defined as in Germany where you have a clear hierarchy Bundesland - Regierungsbezirk - Kreis - Gemeinde which always applies, with the only caveat that the intermediate levels might not always exist. No such simple hierarchy apparently exists in the UK, or England. For example, is "Greater London" a municipality? It appears to be, since it has a mayor. But if it isn't, what is it? Conversely if it is, how can some of its subdivisions also be municipalities. Post codes do not generally coincide with municipalities in both countries, because the postal service isn't attached to administrative units.
@@xaverlustig3581 No, it's not so regular in Germany either. What is Berlin ? Bundesland - Regierungsbezirk - Kreis - Gemeinde ? It's everything at the same time. The administrative functions are different distributed. Is "Kreuzberg" a Kreis or Gemeinde ? The head is called a mayor. But it has functions of Kreis and Gemeinde at the same time.
@@holger_p Berlin and Hamburg each are a Bundesland, a kreisfreie Stadt and a Gemeinde. The Regierungsbezirk level is omitted. Kreuzberg is nothing, it is an administrative subdivision of the Gemeinde Berlin but has no autonomy on any level. It is not a "Gebietskörperschaft", only Berlin is one. (Or Kreuzberg used to not be that, because it doesn't exist any more)
Wonderfully confusing isn't it. One thing that I noticed, but which is definitely colloquial, was that in England people who lived on the outskirts of a settlement, would speak of "going down town" when they lived in a city. But would refer to "going to the city" when they lived in a large town. Insecurity I guess.
Cites here in the Netherlands are much smaller than those from my younger times in England. But I am happy with that, and I think the UN has it about right.
From the City of Den Haag. Capital City. But only the governmental capital?
2:55 that's not quite true, being a Stadt also has some benefits for the local government because a Stadt has a different tax law than a Gemeinde. At least in my home state of lower Saxony these differences mean higher taxes and thus there are many places that could become cities, but that have a population that is quite content with staying a town.
It's so weird to see Alzenau in a TH-cam video that's viewed by thousands of people. I spent my youth in that forlorn place!
It's not like I don't have a shitton of work ahead of me, but I need to know this rn.
Here in New Zealand it's quite simple historically.
Does it have a cathedral?
Later up until 1989 a City had to have 20,000 people to be referred to as a City. After 1989 the cutoff point is 50,000.
Tauranga made the jump from town to city relatively recently.
In Austria there is Statuarstadt (cities and a few privileged towns), Stadt (town), Marktgemeinde (town withtout the right being called town) and Gemeinde, Dorf (village, maybe town). Most of them is historical. There is a "Stadt" with 434 inhabitants (Rattenberg, more than 700 years old) and a "Gemeinde" with 13.575 inhabitants (Wals-Siezenheim).
And then there is Donald Trump in the intro for "The Apprentice" talking about New York: "I love this town."
Categorizing settlements could get very confusing. The place I live is a "Gemeinde", which is often translated as village. But with its about 10,000 citizens, 5 supermarkets and 2 hospitals I would usually call it town, while speaking English. The next bigger place is a Stadt, a - as I learned in this video - Mittelstadt (I would ususally use the term Kleinstadt), in English I also say town. The surrounding places (Gemeinden) building an "Amt" together, one of them consisting out of several villages itself. And finally, there is the big city, also called "Stadt" in German.
But the younger generation around here has the perfect solution for that chaos: every village, irrespective of it is its own Gemeinde or has its own administration, they call "Dorf", the place I live in they use the English word "Town", the Mittelstadt is "Stadt" and for the big city they also use the English term "City". 😅 ~typos corrected
Also "Gemeinden" in NRW can be much bigger than in other states where they would be considered a town
You should've mentioned the "Kaff" as well
Landstadt my be some artificial defnition, but 5000 is a Dorf. And we have a Weiler, which is a settlement of 5 to 10 buildings. Anything between larger than 5.000 to smaller than 10.000 can be either, village aka Dorf or small town aka Kleinstadt. Anything larger 10.000 and smaller 50.000 is clearly a Kleinstadt. Larger than 50.000 to less than 250.000 is a Stadt and above than is probably where the Großstadt starts. City in Germany is closer related to the town center than to size most of the time. Though small towns usually don't have a city only a main shopping street or two.
I am incisting that my city be called a city because it was historically granted this status while after your definition if would only by a town
Oh ja. Bringt Erinnerungen an das Studium zurück. An die Vorlesung "Die Stadt im Mittelalter". Entsprechend Definitionen, wie verschiedene Siedlungen bezeichnet werden. Wie Oppidum oder Urbs.
Wtf haha muss erstmal googlen was das ist. Aber habe grade überlegt ob es bei uns auch sowas gibt.
@@leph565 Es gab so was.
Ja, da erinnere ich mich auch dran
In the Netherlands "city", wich is "stad", depends on whether it has been given "city-rights", wich is "stadsrechten", meaning whether the ruler has/had given the town these rights.. so therefore a "town" wit 50,000 people can be a "stad", while a "city" with e.g. 1,000,000 people can be a town..
Especialy after thinking over all these definitions, delimiters and historic developments
it's not a shame and even advisable to use those terms depending on the stories objective.
One idea striking me is the common use of 'city' as an anglicism in german refering to the city-center formaly known as Fußgängerzone or Innenstadt. therefor many german cties are proud to have a city.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Thank you for todays delicious dessert.
*objective I think is what you mean.
In Romania we have "orașe" (singular "oraș") and "municipii" (singular "municipiu"; think "municipality" in English). The difference being that the latter are larger in population, more urbanized and more important than the former, though there are no specific criteria and the upgrade from "oraș" status to "municipiu" status is determined by law. The capital and all county seats are "municipii", and most counties contain at least a couple of "municipii". Confusingly, however, the term "oraș" is also the generic Romanian word for "city" - one may refer to Bucharest or Constanța or Timișoara as an "oraș" or a "municipiu" depending on whether one is going for brevity or accuracy, but one would always refer to Brussels or Cape Town or Tokyo as an "oraș" and never as a "municipiu".
I suppose the term closest in meaning to the English-language "town" would be "orășel" (the diminutive of "oraș"), but that's just not used as often. In Romania, the dichotomy of (large) city vs (small) town is not as important as that of Bucharest vs "provincie" (anywhere outside the capital regardless of whether it's urban or rural, since people in Bucharest presumably won't bother making the distinction; think "provincial" in English) and city vs country ("țară", with the same double meaning as in English).
What I was always wondering was the word town - which we were taught to translate as "Kleine Stadt" in school - vs village ("Dorf"?)
Because especially with Americans, they seem to only speak of towns, no matter the size or relevance... Is that just an American thing or can anyone in the know explain why you would use the word town in context of just a few hundered residents?
Afaik Americans don't really have the concept of the village in the meaning of a small settlement mainly meant to provide safety and community, but not much trade or commerce, as basically all farms (at least starting west of the appalachians) are solidary, with towns systematically placed as centres of trade and commerce.
I grew up in a place in Kansas with fewer than 200 people but legally it is a 'city'. In Nebraska, where I now live, we have villages & cities. Of course, a village is defined as having fewer than 800 people, anything larger than that is a city.
Hu, interesting.
I come from a Kleinstadt, which would translate to small town here. Ca. 16.000 inhabitants.
Because we did not have big department stores, we would have to travel to the next bigger city, a Großstadt, or large city with 90.000+ inhabitants.
So that is also a usefull distinction for me:
You need shoes, furtniture, or a bicycle? Go to the area of the next larger population center, because, for the life of you, you cannot find those stores where you habitate.
My dad grew up in a small German Stadt that has only like 20k inhabitants. It is a Stadt, because some noble ruler gave it that title who knows how long ago. But my mom comes from a city of half a million people and she always teases him about his home city actually being a village.
In Bavaria there is also the offcial distinction of "Markt". Any Landgemeinde (rural municipality) that isn't a Stadt (town/city) can be recognized as a Marktgemeinde allowing them to add the title "Markt" in front. (Markt meaning market, hence in olden days meant the right to hold a weekly market)
It get's silly when a Marktgemeinde has "Markt" as part of its proper name, like 'Markt Schwaben', which leads to the officially correct 'Markt Markt Schwaben'.
Additionally there's also the predicate "Bad" that any Gemeinde can add to its proper name, when it get's offically recognized as a spa town.
So you can mix both Markt and Bad, so you get places like 'Markt Bad Abbach', which is both a Marktgemeinde and a spa town.
For true sillyness 'Markt Schwaben' should be recognized as a spa town, which would make it offically 'Markt Bad Markt Schwaben'.
Hm I thought "Markt" is a title given to a settlement by some monarch. without that title it was not allowed to have a market.
I would have loved a mention of Arnis, which is the smallest "Stadt" at around 250 inhabitants, and maybe Seevetal, which is the largest "non-Stadt" with just over 40,000 (which has the UN on its side). Of course this still doesn't address the distinction between town and city.
As a German, I like the way it sounds when you say "Stadt".
Thank you and greetings from Windecken, which was granted city rights in 1288. Population: 6,600. Became a district of the city of Nidderau in 1970.
I just use city and town interchangeably, depending on what fits better with the sentence.
Here in the Netherlands we did away with the term 'stad' (city) with the 1848 Constitution. The stad had already lost its priviliges aroun 1800. These days we only have municipalities.
With the ongoing merger of municipalities (from 800+ in the 1980s to ~400 now) a municipality can have 2 or more historic cities.
All municipalities are governed the same way with 1 exception: the 3 islands of Bonaire, Saba and St. Eustatius in the Antilles that are special municipalities due to their special needs far away from the motherland.
Can you explain how the points system for driving licenses work in Germany? How can I get them, what happened when people get an specified number of points, does it counts for foreigners and more?
You get them for doing things wrong while driving, from parking where you are not supposed to park to speeding and driving drunk. If you reach8 points you lose your license and aren't allowed to drive anymore.
@@betaich minor parking infringements or minor speed limit issues won't bring you a point. Massive speeding, tailgating on motorways, unsecured load etc. will. Driving under influence will void the license immediately. After the suspension time you may have to undergo the MPU (medical-psychological investigation). The modern version of the Holy Inquisition. The points are often referred to as "Flensburg points" as the traffic authority is located there. In former times some people tried to cheat by making a foreign license. Nowadays it won't help to present a newly made license from another country while your original one is under suspension.
Tokyo, a city with more people than 150 countries, and Constantinople in 1450, with 50 thousand people. One independent, the other not.
Another way you might prefer is percentage of the population of it´s parent sovereign jurisdiction. If in a federation, that means the regional level like Bavaria and not Germany as a whole for instance. Toronto has 2.6 million people in a country of just under 40 million.
You could do it like we define mountains, such as how Tom Scott said a mountain was a peak with a prominence of 300 metres. If the settlement dominates its surroundings for a certain fraction of the country, with nothing exceeding its size and economy for a certain proportion of its parent county, it is a city.
Ah, Tokyo (Officially the "Tokyo Metropolitan Area" ) is a completely special can of worms in itself that is functionally a "Prefecture", so something akin to a U.S. State or a German Bundesland, that officially consist of 62 municipalities, 23 special wards, 26 cities, 5 towns and 8 villages, as far as I know each with their own major. 😆
Hey in Aschaffeburg there is the Mall / Einkaufszentrum named "City Galerie", so Aschaffenburg is clearly a city ;)
In Sweden there officially are no cities and towns, just kommuner, "communes". Some kommuns do call themselves stad, city. That is because they have old city privileges dating before 1971. Like my kommun Nacka, that got city privileges in 1949. It has over 100.000 inhabitants, but still no one really calls it city.
In german travel guides, Kiruna is always pointed out as the largest city in the world.
Simple - has it been incorporated as a city? Then it is a city. My home town in Canada changed from a town to a city thru incorporation when it had around 12,500 residents.
The US state where I live defines a city as any incorporated municipality, regardless of population, so the small town where I work-population 300 or so-is officially a city, despite having only a bar/restaurant, public library, and post office and no shops.
In Sarnia, Ontario we would consider Eshaffenburg a city, our populations are roughly the same
My ancestral... place in Croatia has 1500 inhabitants and we NEVER call it a village. We have a port, a seafaring history, small industry, nowdays sadly mostly turist industry. Is "citylet" a legitimate English word?
Oakville, Ontario Canada, officially considered a "town" has a population of 213,759.
In Poland it's very much like in Germany, no distinction between town and city, all that matters is whether it has the title of a city or not. Because of this, the largest Polish village is 12,000 people while the smallest city/town is Opatowiec with only 336 people. Why? Because historic reasons. Apparently there was a town of only 8 people in Croatia but I'm not sure if this is still the case.
In Sweden there's no legal concept of a city ("stad") since 1971, only "tätort", maybe best translated as an urban area. "Ort" is a cognate to the German word spelled the same way, except it refers to a settlement and not a place in general. "Tät" means dense.
"Tatort" means "crime scene" in German. Guess that explains all the Swedish crime movies :)
I live in Munich. Which is often described as a village :-D
Oh, what about Marktflecken? Grossgemeinde? Neumark in Thuringia - a Stadt with 500 inhabitants? 🙂
To make it worse, the definition of Stadt differs from Bundesland to Bundesland.If you read the fineprint, it offen only has a administrative meaning. So, it is up to you what you want to tell your followers.
And what is the difference between a village and a town?
And btw, many Germans mean by *city* the *center of a town* if they say something like
_„Lass uns doch einfach einfach in der _*_City_*_ von Hannover treffen, dort gibt's viel mehr Geschäfte und Restaurants.“_
"Let's just meet in the *center* of Hanover, there are much more stores and restaurants."
If I right remember then there was a time when in Germany a settlement had to have a population of over 20,000 to be called a Stadt.
In some German cities I have seen signs pointing which way to go to "City". Which in this case doesn't refer to the whole city but to the center of it. "Downtown" or "Inner city" or "Old town" may all mean vaguely the same but that depends on the place.
Calling the center of a city the City might have something to do with the City of London, but I don't know whether this usage is common in English speaking countries. Is there any English speaking city (except for London which has a City within the city) that refers to its center as "City"?
I'm pretty sure any other city - large or small - in the UK has signs for 'City Centre'. London doesn't have a city centre, so such a location on a sign would be meaningless. As you approach from several miles/kms out, you'll see signs for Central London, but as you get closer they narrow down to e.g. City, Westminster, Southwark, etc. When in central London the signs will indicate nearby districts, as well as 'the North' South-west, etc.
I guess that is an anglicism that caught on in the early 1960ies or so? It sounds modern, international, not as stale as "Stadtmitte".
In England the old basis for being a City was having a Cathedral. That's why Sandfor...sorry Wells is a city and Frome isn't. Usually once a city always a city, but it can go the other way as Rochester found out.
And some people think it still is, but that's not true
Tom Scott - The town that forgot to be a city
There also is a thing, bigger than a "Dorf" and smaller than a "Stadt". Its called "Flecken". (Also on the entrance-sign.) How would you translate this?
I have a translation question. Wouldn't be Hauptstadt, Bundesstadt and Reichsstadt be a city but the other Städte are towns ? its hard to translate for me because their is nothign simmilar in english.
"Hauptstadt" translates as "capital city", "Bundesstadt" is what the Swiss call Berne and the Germans used to call Bonn when it was the seat of government and can be literally translated as "federal city", and "Reichsstadt" is part of the phrase "Freie und Reichsstadt" which is translated as "free imperial city" (a city that was largely autonomous and was represented at the Imperial Diet).
"Gemeinde" is the political entity, not the settlement. A lot of gemeinden have multible settlements (Dörfer within their borders)
I once made the mistake of referring to a city largely defined by its university as a “university town” and a local on Reddit went bananas, saying that it was indeed a city and I was slandering it by dubbing it a mere town.
My city, Reutlingen, has often liked to call itself Germany's smallest large city (it's just over 100,000). I don't know if it's still current though.
Historically though, it was a "free imperial city". They hold the "Schwortag" every summer for a bit of fun.
My wife is from there and her accent still kills me.
In the current list on Wikipedia, it's 67th out of 80 Großstädte in Germany. The smallest by that list is Hildesheim.
I lived in Tübingen for almost a decade but always had to go to the Reutlingen customs office to pick up my parcels from the U.S.
@@Thiesi unfortunately, they've now moved it to Metzingen. I'm not looking forward to having to go there if we get any packages that customs wants to inspect.
@@karlwiklund2108 Well, you could always combine it with a nice little shopping trip to Hugo Boss Town then! 😆