A settlement isn’t even close to a city. A settlement isn’t even a village.

Strictly-speaking, there’s no generally-accepted international definition of “city”, something which surprised me a bit.

This has come up for me in the past in several interesting ways:

• China tends to define “cities” using a dramatically-more-expansive definition than what the US or European countries would. China does have cities with very large population, but this definition tends to result in things that in the US would be treated more as entire regions being treated as cities.

  kagis for someone talking about this

  https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/when-we-mention-city-china-what-talking-xianwei-zhang

  Size of cities

  In China, the word “city” corresponds to administrative divisions with sizes of large variance. A counter-intuitive fact is that the largest “city” in China according to land area is none of the four direct-controlled municipalities (DCM). China’s largest DCM is Chongqing, with an area of about 82.4 thousand square kilometers. This area is no match for the largest “city” in China: Hulunbuir. The name of Hulunbuir comes from two lakes in its territory, with the meaning of otter and male otter respectively. Hulunbuir has an area of approximately 264 thousand square kilometers. For comparison, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, where Hulunbuir locates, is about 1.183 million square kilometers, and the land area of the People’s Republic of China is about 9.603 million square kilometers. If we put Hulunbuir into the ranking of Chinese provincial administrative divisions by area, it can rank No. 9, and if compared with areas of countries, Hulunbuir can rank 70-80, smaller than New Zealand (270 thousand square kilometers), but larger than UK (242 thousand square kilometers). Thus it is no wonder that Hulunbuir is the city with largest land area globally.

• If you want to write code to render a map, which I was doing with OpenStreetMap data the other day in R, you can’t just easily say “X is a city and Y is a town”.

• The US doesn’t even have any kind of accepted definition across states (or, in at least for the few states that I’ve looked at, an official definition within a given state).