Town

[citation needed] In England, a town was a small community that could not afford or was not allowed to build walls or other larger fortifications, and built a palisade or stockade instead.

could refer to diverse kinds of settlements from agricultural estates and holdings, partly picking up the Norse sense (as in the Scots word fermtoun) at one end of the scale, to fortified municipalities.

[citation needed] A distinction was created between rustic and urban settlements: In Afghanistan, a city and a town are both referred to as shār (Dari: شهر; Pashto: ښار).

Larger municipalities are designated as market towns (German: Marktgemeinden) or cities (Städte), but these distinctions are purely symbolic and do not confer additional legal responsibilities.

The status does not come with any additional autonomy: district administrative authorities are essentially just service centers that citizens use to interact with the national government, for example to apply for driver licenses or passports.

Ontario allows municipalities to select whichever administrative term they like with no legal distinction existing between towns, townships, cities, and villages.

Such towns are known as købstad (roughly the same meaning as borough albeit deriving from a different etymology) and they retain the exclusive right to the title even after the last vestiges of their privileges vanished through the reform of the local administration carried through in 1970.

In Hungary, a village can gain the status of város ('town'), if it meets a set of diverse conditions for quality of life and development of certain public services and utilities (e.g. having a local secondary school or installing full-area sewage collection pipe network).

Every year the Minister of Internal Affairs selects candidates from a committee-screened list of applicants, whom the President of Republic usually affirms by issuing a bill of town's rank to them.

Since being a town carries extra fiscal support from the government, many relatively small villages try to win the status of városi rang ('town rank') nowadays.

However, the term ayara is normally used only to describe towns in foreign countries, i.e. urban areas of limited population, particularly when the speaker is attempting to evoke nostalgic or romantic attitudes.

Although Italian provides different words for city (città), town (cittadina or paese) and village (villaggio, old-fashioned, or frazione, most common), no legal definitions exist as to how settlements must be classified.

Remarkable exceptions do exist: for instance, Bassano del Grappa, was given the status of città in 1760 by Francesco Loredan's dogal decree and has since then carried this title.

This was further supported and indicated by the income classification system implemented by the National Department of Finance, to which both cities and towns fell into their respective categories that indicate they are such as stated under Philippine law.

There is, however, a number of exemptions due to historic or political reasons, when a municipality meets neither of these two conditions but nevertheless has the city status, including the only 3 capitals of the former voivodeships of Poland (1975–1998) not meeting the abovementioned criteria, as well as further 38 municipalities which do not fit into any of the mentioned categories but have nevertheless been allowed to keep the earlier awarded status due to unspecified historical reasons.

Some settlements tend to remain villages even though they have a larger population than many smaller towns, primarily in order not to lose eligibility for the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development.

Like other Latin cultures, in Portugal a town (vila) is a populated place larger than a village (aldeia and smaller than a city (cidade).

A Portuguese town or city is so merely an urban settlement located in the area of a municipality, in comparison to the North American context, where they have political functions.

Portuguese local governments heraldry reflects if the seat of the respective freguesia or municipality is a city, town or another type of settlement.

In Russia, the criteria an inhabited locality needs to meet in order to be granted city/town (gorod) status vary in different federal subjects.

The term tätort is used for an urban area or a locality, which however is a statistical rather than an administrative concept and encompasses densely settled villages with only 200 inhabitants as well as the major cities.

The word köping corresponds to an English market town (chipping) or German Markt but is mainly of historical significance, as the term is not used today and only survives in some toponyms.

[28] In Ukraine the term town (містечко, mistechko) existed from the Medieval period until 1925, when it was replaced by the Soviet government with urban type settlement.

In fact, because of many successive changes to the structure of local government, there are now few large towns which are represented by a body closely related to their historic borough council.

Municipalities vary greatly in size, from the millions of residents of New York City and Los Angeles to the few hundred people who live in Jenkins, Minnesota.

In Hawaii, the Department of Business, Economic Development, and Tourism has the statutory authority to establish, modify, or abolish the statistical boundaries for cities, town, and.

Many communities have found this "semi-incorporated" status attractive; the state has only 20 incorporated cities, and towns as large as Paradise (186,020 in 2000 Census), home of the Las Vegas Strip.

First, a petition and referendum process was created whereby the voters can require that the mayor and town council be elected to four-year terms of office.

According to the North Carolina League of Municipalities,[42] there is no legal distinction among a city, town, or village—it is a matter of preference of the local government.

[50] In Vietnam, a district-level town (Vietnamese: thị xã) is the second subdivision, below a province (tỉnh) or municipality (thành phố trực thuộc trung ương).