As a non-American, I’m very confused by this. If it’s a town, it’s not rural by definition. Because, you-know, it’s urban.
Also, could we get a definition of town vs small town. Do you not have the concept of a village? (Village in the UK would be a settlement with a population of a couple of thousand, with usually a pub, local shop, maybe a post office and primary school if you’re lucky).
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Most towns are not urban by any standard. I ate dinner over the weekend in a town with a population of 669. It was big enough to have its own restaurant and post office. It was a 30-40 minute drive from any town with a population over 10,000 (and that, just barely).
This is why I was confused. There’s no way that’s a town with so few people (from a UK perspective)
Another consideration might be how far your “town” is from a more major center.
A town with a population of 1000 might not feel that rural if it’s 10 miles down the road from a city of a million.
If the next closest center > 5,000pop is 250 miles away… Perhaps a different story.
I’ve hear it said that in Europe 100km is considered a long distance and in North America 100 years is considered a long time.
To my knowledge, US states may use different terms for municipalities, collections of homesteads, etc. as they wish because of the 10th amendment in the US Constitution, i.e. it’s not explicitly given to the fed government to prescribe the hierarchy. But I’m no expert on this subject, so I could be mistaken.
Depending on the state there may be different formal definitions based on population and incorporation status. In Ohio, we have townships, villages, and cities. In Pennsylvania they have “boroughs” instead of villages. In NY a borough is a subdivision of a city. I don’t think they have the township organizational structure in Vermont. In Maine there are unincorporated territories (usually just numbered).
The role of the county government can vary significantly from state to state too.
The role of the county government can vary significantly from state to state too.
My understanding is that in Virginia the city/town that serves as the county seat is explicitly not a part of the county it’s located in!
Aight, so, we got cities/metropolitan areas, then we have the outer edge of cities called suburbs (could also be referred to as towns), then we got further out areas, which are rural, which have a lot of agriculture and wilderness.
“Small” and “rural” are used as qualifying adjectives, and typically compound. Rural: generally far from near by cities, lots of wilderness/agriculture around. Small: not a lot of residents or amenities.
Village is not a term that is commonly used, at least not where I’m from (midwest).
Your village is our small rural town: low population density, lots of wilderness/agriculture, not a lot of buildings.
And then we have “the sticks” a remote place mostly removed from civilization.
Cool, thank you
My uncle lives up in Omak
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omak,_Washington
This is a small town. We don’t call them villages, we call them towns for some reason.
Technically speaking, Omak is a city actually. But pretty much everyone will call it a town around here.
We’re in the Philly burbs and it’s known as a Village.
Here are some descriptions and photos of what most small towns look like: https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/trip-ideas/washington/slow-paced-towns-in-wa
A really small town is like what you’re calling a village. I think most people outside the US think that rural is closer to urban areas than it usually is. It typically starts a half hour outside a major city and then can be 7-10 hours to the next major city depending on what state you’re in. The upper east coast is probably closer to Europe. Rural encompasses a huge swath of the US land, and most are very isolated physically and mentally.
Here is a map showing the population densities by county: https://irjci.blogspot.com/2020/08/census-bureau-to-end-counting-efforts.html
It means the town doesn’t have a Walmart
Damn that’s actually a pretty good definition. Huh
Thanks,
After thinking about it a bit, towns with a large corporate presence, like a major grocery store etc., but no Walmart, would fall somewhere in between rural and urban. Low or no corporate presence is almost always a rural town.
They’re still cities, but people tend to start calling them “rural” when you get a certain distance from the big cities and things spread out, often also near farmland and/or nature.
For example, this would probably count as rural.
The town by my camp is about that size, 900 souls, and that includes a great deal of surrounding area. We have a general store/gas station, restaurant, mechanic, hair place (still open?), Post Office, fire station (unmanned I think?), two churches, halfway house, tiny school of some sort and a Dollar General, two “cities” 20-miles in either direction. Most of those 900 souls are in the surrounding country.
I would think this is OP’s definition of “village”. There are smaller places in between those two cities, but Holt is the “big” one.
OP: We don’t use the term “village” in America. “Small town” can be a confusing term as that may mean what I described, or it might mean 30,000 people in a suburb attached to a larger town. Or, it might mean any amount of people at all. 🤷🏻
That’s an American “Town.”
That’s different from anything I’ve seen in the UK. Every house seems to be surrounded with lawns and so spread out, and yet you still need whatever that giant building with the green roof and car park is. Presumably a shop? Why’d you need such a big building for so few people? And why are all the houses detached with no terraces? Very strange…
(All of that was rhetorical, I’m sure it makes sense if that’s what you’re used to. And having more room to spread out and less history to deal with)
Poor OP. They’re leaving this thread more confused than ever.
The United States is huge and every region has different definitions and expectations of “city”, “town”, “suburb”, “wide place in the road”, etc. LOL, when I was a kid we called Tulsa, OK a “small town”. Well, yeah, as opposed to Chicagoland.
You won’t find anything definitive, but we don’t use the word “village” except to connote… well, I can’t really say. But I know one when I see it!
People will start calling their settlement a “village” here when they’ve decided to start being pretentious about it. Expect to find a winery there, or a studio where someone with frizzy hair makes inscrutable physical art, or a bunch of horse enthusiasts.
The use of the word definition here should be interpreted as squishy and non-strict.
In most of the world that speaks a more British English, terms like city and town have pretty specific definitions. That’s just not the case in the US. Language is funny, huh?
Village usually means really upscale neighborhood. I have no idea why they’re called that, but they are.
Huh. Californian here, I usually only hear people say “village” when talking about towns in poor countries. (I don’t agree with this.)
Meant to add that, didn’t have the words and you nailed it. Thanks!
Like a town population 500 or less not within a hour drive of a city.
I live in Nebraska grew up in a village of 30 people, went to school in a town of 2500. Live currently in a town of 300.
Edit - since I received some upvotes and I’m no longer at my daughter’s softball game. I wanted to add when I was in school 30 some years ago, my geography teacher told us Nebraska actually didn’t have towns due to population requirements that there wasn’t one that actually defined a town, it’s was technically city or village. Whether that’s still true or not I have no idea.
A lot of this is going to be subjective and depend on your personal frame of reference, as well as local laws and customs that can vary a lot around the country
In general, in normal casual conversation, most Americans are going to refer to a municipality as a “town” unless they’re in a big city. Legally, that municipality might be considered a city, town, township, borough, home rule municipality, village, etc. but unless it’s a big city we’re probably going to refer to it as a town most of the time
There’s also, in some areas, unincorporated communities that don’t have an actual municipal government, but if there’s a relatively dense area, we might go ahead and refer to that area as a town.
Some parts of the US do have some sort of legal definition for “village,” in others it might be used informally to refer to a small “quaint” town, or part of the town.
There’s also the distinction of, for example, being “in a town” vs “in town” or “downtown”
Most of us who don’t live in a big city would say that we live in a town, meaning the municipality we live in. Somewhat less of us live “in town” meaning something more like the denser, more “urban” parts of town, probably resembling what you think of as a village, and “downtown” would refer to something like the area around the main street or main commercial area where you might find stores, restaurants, bars, etc.
So a “rural town” is basically any sort of town in a rural area. I’m not sure if there’s any sort of a legal definition for a rural town, but in general I’d say that if a town is surrounded by woods and/or farmland and you can’t trace an unbroken path of suburban sprawl from it back to a major city it’s rural.
Some of those rural towns can actually be fairly big and urbanized, but they’re otherwise in a rural area in their own little bubble so we’d still consider it to be a rural town.
As far as town vs “small town” that’s kind of subjective.
The town I grew up in is often referred to as a small town, largely because it’s physically pretty small, almost exactly 1 square mile, but that 1 mile is pretty densely populated, I think the population is around 9-10k people currently, it’s just a couple miles outside of the nearest major city, and pretty well-urbanized itself, connected to several major highways, was once a big manufacturing town but is now pretty gentrified, with a solid handful of 10+ floor office buildings. People from more rural areas probably wouldn’t agree that it’s a “small town” but people from a bit city probably would think so, and for those of us “townies” whose families have lived here for a few generations still feel like it has a small town feel, even if the newer transplants don’t all share that feeling.
The town I currently live in isn’t quite rural, but it’s getting there. I’m towards the edge of the suburbs now, maybe even into the exurbs. The town is physically much larger, but only has about half the population. That small, less dense population makes it still feel kind of small-towny.
Also worth noting, my town doesn’t really have any sort of a “downtown” area, no real main street to go walking around or anything. We have a few businesses and stores and such roughly clustered in the same area, but it’s not a cohesive thing that feels like a “town” or what you might recognize as a “village.” I would normally may this, but if I said I was going “into town” for something, most people around me would probably understand that I’m going to one of our neighboring towns that are a bit more built-up
So some combination of physical size, population, population density, and a curtain je ne sais quoi are what makes a town a small town.
Very detailed, and that explains a lot, thank you.
There’s a few other weird situations that can come into play too, like mailing addresses, census designated places, neighborhoods, etc.
My town doesn’t have its own post office, so my mail gets handled by the post office in a neighboring town, so my mailing address says that town instead of the municipality I actually live in, so more often than not if I have to give out my address that’s what I’m saying.
I also live in a 'census designated place" basically an area that’s officially recognized as having its own identity. It’s basically just a fancy nickname for my neighborhood, so some people in this area will say that instead of the name of the municipality or the mailing address.
It’s actually pretty rare for anyone to give the name of my municipality when asked for what town they live in unless we’re talking about local politics.
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Just wait until you find out about townships.
No thanks, America is already confusing enough 👍
But wait there’s more! Like Hamlets which are smaller than a village.
And we haven’t even started getting into the different types of cities: Metropolitis, Twin, Satellite.
It’s ok, we have hamlets here too. I live in one!
Minneapolis is the best of the two twin cities :)
Sorry, St Paul. All you’ve got going is Casetta’s and Can Can Wonderland.
There are named towns in the US with populations in the single digits. This can be due to either the population moving away, fleeing, or simply dying off over time – Centralia, PA leaps to mind – or because it’s just a cluster of a couple of houses at a crossroads that would otherwise be in the middle of nowhere. There may not necessarily be a post office or any other services there.
In fact, there are “towns” in the US in that they are named on the map and have a defined location filed with the state/county/Postal Service, but they have no inhabitants at all. In many cases this is because a planned development never actually happened.
See also: census designated places, a collection of people with no formal town incorporation/government. My dad grew up in a “town” (CDP) of about 250 residents. It’s about a half hour drive from the nearest real town, for things like groceries and hospitals.
Centralia is small because the mine fire has been burning since the 50s or so. It’s basically condemned.
Yes, it’s an example of the “everyone fled” variety. Well, almost everyone.
This guy has a YouTube channel of him just driving around small towns in the rural Midwest USA. https://youtube.com/@joeandnicsroadtrip
There are towns that are entirely just housing developments with no stores, no services, and no schools for miles. We are extremely spread out and even a town of a couple thousand people can have nothing nearby. These are what I’ve always known as “rural” towns. Farming communities and suburbs entirely cut off from the bigger cities by miles of just empty fields and farm land, in addition to places like up around Mariposa with populations of sub 100 people, cut off more by the mountainous terrain than because of how the infrastructure was built up.
A suburb would literally be suburban, not rural.
Is it really a suburb if it’s 30-50 miles away from the nearest city or amenities and not just in the surrounding area on its outskirts? Cuz many of the towns considered suburbs are that distance or more from the city they are supposedly suburbs of.
An American Small Town sounds a lot like your village.
But, we have like 10,000x as much space to spread out in, so we can have these villages every 10 miles or so in every direction. You could easily drive for 24 hours across the country and easily avoid all major cities.
