27 Giugno 2016• • wp_15726338
The distinction between a town and a city similarly depends on the approach: a city may strictly be an administrative entity which has been granted that designation by law, but in informal usage, the term is also used to denote an urban locality of a particular size or importance: whereas a medieval city may have possessed as few as 10,000 inhabitants, today some consider an urban place of fewer than 100,000 as a town, even though there are many officially designated cities that are much smaller than that.
In toponymic terminology, names of individual towns and cities are called astyonyms or astionyms (from Ancient Greek ἄστυ ‘town, city’, and ὄνομα ‘name’).
Through different periods of recorded history, many towns have grown into sizeable settlements, with the development of properties, centres of culture, and specialized economies.
Historically some towns held various privileges, the most important of which was the right to hold market. They were administered separately from the rural areas in both fiscal, military and legal matters. 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.
Towns of more than 50,000 people are able to gain the status of megyei jogú város (town with the rights of a county), which allows them to maintain a higher degree of services. (There are a few exceptions, when towns of fewer than 50,000 people gained the status: Érd, Hódmezővásárhely, Salgótarján and Szekszárd)
The Local Government act 2001 provides that from January 1, 2002 (section 10 subsection.
Within the county in which they are situated and of which they form part, there continue to be such other local government areas as are set out in Schedule which – (a) in the case of the areas set out in Chapter 1 of that Schedule, shall be known as boroughs, and – (b) in the case of the areas set out in Chapter 2 of that Schedule, shall be known as towns, and in this Act a reference to a town shall include a reference to a borough.
The reference to town having a population of at least 7,500 as ascertained at the last preceding census hands much of the power relating to defining what is in fact a town over to the Central Statistics Office and their criteria are published as part of each census.
Another reference to the Census and its role in determining what is or is not a town for some administrative purpose is in the Planning and Development act 2000 (part II chapter I which provides for Local area plans)
A local area plan shall be made in respect of an area which —(i) is designated as a town in the most recent census of population, other than a town designated as a suburb or environs in that census, (ii) has a population in excess of 2,000, and (iii) is situated within the functional area of a planning authority which is a county council.
In short they speak of “towns with legally defined boundaries” ( i.e. those established by the Local Government Act 2001) and the remaining 664 as “census towns”, defined by themselves since 1971 as a cluster of 50 or more occupied dwellings in which within a distance of 800 meters there is a nucleus of 30 occupied houses on both sides of the road or twenty occupied houses on one side of the road there is also a 200 meter criterion for determining whether a house is part of a census town.
The 2011 Census of India defines towns of two types: statutory town and census town. Statutory town is defined as all places with a municipality, corporation, cantonment board or notified town area committee. Census towns are defined as places that satisfy the following criteria:
Towns in India usually have basic infrastructure like shops, electricity, bituminised roads, post offices, banks, telephone facilities, high schools and sometimes a few government offices. The human population living in these towns may be a few thousand. There are some towns which can be labelled as Main road town.
In state of Karnataka, towns are known as Pete or Pura in the Kannada language. Sometimes the terms pattana (‘city’) or ooru, which generally means ‘place’, are used for towns. The administrative council which governs these towns is known as Pura Sabhe or Nagara Sabhe in Kannada depending on the number of people living within the town’s boundaries.
In contemporary Persian texts, no distinction is made between city and town; both translate as Shahr (شهر). In older Persian texts (until the first half of the 20th century), the Arabic word Qasabeh (قصبه) was used for a town. However, in the past 50 years, this word has become obsolete.
There is a word in Persian which is used for special sort of satellite townships and city neighborhoods. It is Shahrak (شهرک), (lit.: ‘small city’).
Another smaller type of town or neighborhood in a big city is called Kuy (کوی). Shahrak and Kuy each have different legal definitions.
Large cities such as Tehran, Mashhad, Isfahan, Tabriz, etc. which have millions inhabitants are referred to as Kalan-shahr (کلانشهر), metropole.