In the Holy Roman Empire, and to a degree in its successor states the German Confederation and the German Empire, so-called "free imperial cities" (nominative singular freie Reichsstadt, nominative plural freie Reichsstädte) held the legal status of imperial immediacy, according to which they were not subinfeudated to any vassal ruler and were instead subject to the authority of the Emperor alone.
Examples included Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck, along with others that gained and/or lost the privileges of immediacy over the course of the Empire's history.
Addis Ababa, capital of Ethiopia, has held the designation of chartered city since 1991, when it was separated from the former province of Shewa.
In South Korea, the main criterion for granting secession from the province is a population reaching one million.
By far the largest among these in terms of population is the capital, Seoul, called a teukbyeol-si (Korean: 특별시; Hanja: 特別市; lit.
On 1 July 2012, Yeongi-gun, Chungcheongnam-do absorbed parts of Cheonan, Gongju and Cheongju, and became independent from Chungcheongnam-do as Sejong Special Self-governing City under the Special Act on the Installation of Sejong City.
In 2006, the ruling party floated a proposal to eliminate all current province and independent-city borders.
This plan would divide the entire republic into fifty or sixty city- or county-level administrations, similar to the system in Japan.
The plan was intended to help reduce regional discrimination and animosity by eliminating provincial identity.
In practise, most cities outside of Metropolitan Manila are often still grouped with provinces that they were partitioned from for the sake of convenience and simplicity.
Hong Kong and Macao have the status of special administrative regions, separated from their original province Guangdong.
[1] In Thailand, the capital Bangkok operates independently of any province and is considered a special administrative area.
The Kepulauan Seribu (Thousand Islands) administration-regency is also included in the formal definition of Jakarta.
Mayors of the five administration-cities and the regent of Kepulauan Seribu administration-regency are not elected, but directly appointed by the Governor and members of the Provincial Parliament of Jakarta.
In Germany, most of the federal states are subdivided into administrative districts called Kreise (engl.
[b]: Effectively a Kreisfreie Stadt, although the city is de jure a part of the special-status Hanover Region.
Two cities in Germany, namely Berlin and Hamburg, are considered city-states (German: Stadtstaaten).
Through the financial redistribution system of Equalization Payments in Germany (German: Länderfinanzausgleich), they do receive more money because of their demographic characteristics.
After the Napoleonic era, in 1815, four were still city-states: Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck in Northern Germany, and Frankfurt where the Federal Convention was located.
Cork, Dublin, Galway, Limerick and Waterford are governed by independent city councils.
Among Polish municipalities containing a town or a city, 638 are organized as a mixed urban-rural gmina (Polish: gmina miejsko-wiejska) consisting of a town and surrounding villages and countryside, governed by a common municipal government.
In Spain, there exist two so-called autonomous cities, Ceuta and Melilla, which are located on the North African coast surrounded by Morocco and have been under Spanish jurisdiction since the 15th century.
Nonetheless, they function as autonomous communities with a high degree of self-administration and law-making powers.
There was no County Council (which is elected by the people and is responsible for example for health care); instead, the City of Stockholm handled such tasks.
One of the cantons of Switzerland, Basel-Stadt, is considered to be a city-state, although it contains two smaller municipalities Bettingen and Riehen alongside the city of Basel itself.
Many cities and large urban areas are unitary authorities, meaning they have their own local government, separate from the surrounding county.
London has its own assembly and directly elected mayor, which exercise local government/devolved powers greater than any other city or place in the UK, apart from the nations/provinces of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
In the Canadian province of Ontario, independent cities are referred to as a single-tier municipalities.
In Quebec, they are often called separated cities, as they are not a part of their surrounding regional county municipality.
In Saskatchewan and Manitoba, all cities, towns, villages, and resort villages are separate from their surrounding rural municipality; unincorporated communities, including local urban districts, remain part of the rural municipality they lie within.