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A "big city" is large enough to have a major league professional sports franchise. There are about 40 of them. A "small town" has only one high school. Everythng else is "in between".
The city and county I live in has 70,000 people, and has in its own micropolitan identity, the largest population center between Houston and San Antonio, two hours away from either of them. But it's ten times as big as the town I grew up in. I describe where I live as a city or as a town, depending on who I am talking to and what the context is.
So you can't really slice it into big, small and in between. There are more relevant gradients than that. The earth lies somewhere on a scale between a drifting hydrogen atom and a red giant star. Is the earth large or small?
I would only go by metro or urban pop. Going by city pop is of course is of course too inconsistent. Saying that Hartford CT is a smaller city, and Lincoln NE is medium sized would be naive.
I would just like to point out that "city" just means incorporated municipality. I technically live in a city and the population here is about 29,000. We have our own schools, police, fire, trash pick up, mayor, utilities apart from the county. However, no one would ever look at the place and call it a city so I call it a town. We have very low population density; the population is spread over 85 square miles of land. We don't even have a central downtown.
I'm From the Country a Farm town in Eastern North Carolina where the whole county has a population less than 8,000. I myself would prefer living in a more urban area a mid-sized metro where i can get anything i want but without it being Hugely over populated. Cities like Houston, DC, Charlotte, Atlanta etc... are what i like. Super cities like NY or LA are way too big and me being a Country guy(I'm Black fyi) i think the Culture and attitude of the people would bother me. lol idk. That's just my opinion.
I think it is all up to perception...I live in the south and here, Atlanta is looked at like NY is in the NE, where places like Raleigh, Charlotte, Nashville, Columbia, Birmingham, Greensboro, Knoxville, etc. are looked upon as bigger cities so I think it really depends on where you are located.
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